Opening Reception Thursday 18 October, 6 – 8 pm

Kerlin Gallery is pleased to present a series of new painted by the highly acclaimed artist, Merlin James (b.1960). James who lives and works in Glasgow is known for his intensively worked and generally small-scale canvases that encompass a wide variety of subject matter including the erotic, empty interiors, rural landscapes or abstract motifs

In recent years Merlin James has made paintings often on semi-transparent supports and continues to paint on canvas, frequently using hair, sawdust and other unconventional substances as well as paint. Often distressed, cut, pierced, cropped or heavily overpainted, these works refine and renew many of painting’s most time-honoured concerns – genre and narrative, pictorial space and expressive gesture, the emotive resonance of colour and texture. His apt description of the painterly project of an admired forebear, Alex Katz (James is also an accomplished and widely published critic), is equally applicable to his own practice, i.e. he continues to play the grand, complex game of Western painting while reflecting a fully contemporary consciousness of the modern and postmodern disjunctures of history and culture. Writing in Frieze (November2011), Ara Merjian notes how James’ work is ‘stubbornly, mischievously paradoxical’ and that ‘vacillates between the cerebral and the basic stuff of paint’.

James has exhibited widely from London to New York. He represented Wales at the 52nd Venice Biennale and is held in many public and private collections worldwide. He recently held a solo show in the Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin (2012).