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Peter Gillies makes mixed media work where abstract marks and stains are combined with collage elements to create a highly coloured, dynamic surface on the canvas. Edges are torn, surfaces are obliterated and them reanimated through gesture. His use of vibrant colour, together with often barely visible but personally significant pieces of text, evoke and allude to moments in time and other places.
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"I make paintings to make sense of what is surely beyond sense; layers of marks, gestures, stains and writing. Surfaces that are stacked upon surfaces, torn edges sometimes breaking up and breaking off, colour replacing colour, forms changing but holding shape. The making of each work is a way of collating experience, trying to process the things that are always behind the things you think you know." |
With over two decades of consistent artistic development and achievement behind him, Peter Gillies exhibits his work both nationally and internationally.
Born in Luton, he is now based in Sheffield
where he has a studio at Yorkshire Artspace. He received
his MA in Fine Art from Nottingham Trent University in 1988
and subsequently was awarded the Artescape Painting Fellowship.
As well as numerous solo and group exhibitions in the UK
and abroad, he has completed artists projects at both the
Natural History Museum, London and Tate St Ives. In Spring
2000 and Autumn 2004, Peter was artist in residence at the
Scuola Internazionale di Grafica in Venice. Major shows
of his work have been seen at London's PM Gallery, the Italian
- German Cultural Institute, Palazzo Albrizzi in Venice
and the Zeit Kunst Gallery in Halle, Germany.
Being in Venice has considerably influenced the nature of Peter's work; especially the fragile surfaces of the buildings and the physicality of the environment. Concentrated periods of time as an artist in residence, as well as annual visits to the city since 1997, have provided a wealth of ideas, experience and references.
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"Venice haunts my imagination like nowhere else.
The intense fall of light bouncing off the pastel shaded walls in late afternoon, casting long shadows over the flagstones and walkways; sending smaller waterways into semi-darkness. Gliding past these secretive places I observe them from an ever shifting viewpoint.
Banners are suspended from the buildings and bridges, blocks of strident colour hang in the air. Even the poster boards are unique, the edges of paper lifted and fraying, affected by their proximity to the water. The graffiti shifts from a sprayed symbol on the side of a small footbridge to a white painterly daub over a crumbling pink facade, to be viewed across the campo. Wonderful gestural moments fading with the procession of time.
Again I notice the illuminated fragility of each surface, the detail, I go up close. There are marks and scratches and scars everywhere - on the walls, floors, street corners, canal sides and jetties. The whole fabric of the city is like a document, evidence of its own movement and slow shifting.
This is the inspiration behind each of my paintings." |
For his Venice exhibition in October 2004, Peter installed a series of sixteen continuous panels (each 112 x 76cm) around the perimeter of the Galleria Sotoportego. Collectively entitled 'La Carta Canta' ('The Paper Sings'), the series contains marks, gestures, scratches and stains which evoke his continued fascination for the weathered and graffiti strewn surfaces of walls, posterboards and hoardings.
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"These paintings refer to a sense of place, for they are filled with ghosts and echoes through the filter of the memory, of having been somewhere at a certain time. I use rhythm, pulse and the emphasis of particular forms and colours to connect and articulate these levels of reality." |
Interwoven into these map-like layers are passages of writing which explore memories of time spent in Venice, together with colours and textures suggesting the fabric of the city: its frescoes and mosaics, its shimmering exteriors and golden interiors and constant intersections of land by water.
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"Like merely scratching in the sand, they feel like a doomed effort to preserve experiences that contains so much, every emotional step on a ladder between hope and hopelessness, between frustration and bliss." |
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