Private View - Thursday 1 November 6.30-8.30pm
The Fine Art Society is proud to announce their third solo
show for the Scottish artist John Byrne. Consisting of an
entirely new body of work, the exhibition, one of his
largest to date, will be displayed across two floors of the
gallery.
Byrne’s return to painting after two decades of critically
acclaimed writing for the theatre and for television has seen his
reputation as an artist of great merit grow. At 72, Bryne is living
a quiet life in Edinburgh where he paints incessantly. Being
happily emancipated from any ‘school’ or ‘scene’ allows him a
pleasurable and productive time in the studio.
Almost everything Byrne paints is cultivated from his boyhood
memories and his imagination. Byrne was brought up in a dire
housing scheme in Paisley in the 1950s at a time when the
town was known as the murder capital of Scotland. There is no
doubt that a sense of danger pervades his paintings, especially
in urban scenes, although he refrains from creating any kind of satirical comment or clichéd, dark
underworld. His figures are compelling not abhorrent, and rather than simply creating caricatures, Byrne
fleshes out complex narrative threads, drawing immediate parallels to his fully formed characters on stage.
The exhibition features some pure landscape painting, which are relatively rare in his output. Describing a
recently finished landscape Bryne said “oh, it's of nowhere in particular”'. These works may not describe an
actual place, however despite their mysticism they still conjure a
sense of specificity via the artist’s technical prowess and
recognizable aesthetic.
Although Byrne has never worried about situating himself in the
contemporary art world, he has quickly become appreciated as
a serious painter, with both commercial success and
institutional support. An exhibition of Byrne's portraits is
scheduled to take place at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery
in 2014. His series of self-portraits which span the last fifty
years, are incredibly diverse in mood and conception. Amongst
his most powerful work are his studies of those closest to him,
memorably of his father in 1970s, of his previous partner Tilda
Swinton, a masterly sanguine drawing of whom is in SNPG,
their twins Honor and Xavier and most recently of his partner
Jeanine.