Recent Painting: Brad Lochore
To create these works, Lochore works with a variety of techniques – from photos of shadows, to the direct casting of the shadow onto the canvas either through projection in the studio or through direct casting in nature.
UK based painter Brad Lochore left New Zealand in 1977 and has been in London since where he has steadily gained a reputation as one of the hottest young painters in Britain today. His exhibition at Gow Langsford Gallery from 10th February will be his first solo exhibition in his homeland.
Lochore is known for his paintings of shadows and light and it was these that captured the interest of prestigious art collector Charles Saatchi in the mid 1990’s. Work was subsequently purchased for his collection and included in a number of significant exhibitions including Young British Artists IV, at The Saatchi Gallery with accompanying major catalogue. It was this sort of exposure, which in the heady days of late 20th Century British art, propelled Lochore to recognition with the likes of Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin.
Lochore describes his work as an exercise in “seduction and betrayal”. They seduce the viewer with their beauty yet hold an ambiguity that disarms. New works depict palm trees, ceiling fans, lampposts, hedges and a child’s swing. They are figurative yet are a distorted reality – they are paintings of the shadows cast by these elements rather than the images themselves – “…an image of something that has never existed as an originary object, but are presented to the beholder as a painted object….this is a created fiction (but yet also a truth).” (Andrew Wilson, Brad Lochore, Victoria Miro Gallery, 1998, p.1)
To create these works, Lochore works with a variety of techniques – from photos of shadows, to the direct casting of the shadow onto the canvas either through projection in the studio or through direct casting in nature. The resulting works are “…floating pale images in a ‘milky’ open space, [where] Lochore skilfully emphasizes a vaporous tactility and the translucence of optical sensations.” (Markek Bartelik, Artforum, November 1998, p. 125)
Lochore trained as a student at London’s Goldsmiths College and was a pupil of renowned German painter Gerhard Richter who taught “an approach to painting through photography without denying paint its capacity to be viscerally seductive” (ibid, p.125). See this in his new work painted both in London and more locally at his studio on Waiheke Island from 10th February.