My exhibition at the National Gallery, Clive Head: Modern Perspectives (October 13-November 28), displays the use of perspective as a contemporary tool for painting. Creating paintings is always about inventing space, but the rigid geometry of Renaissance perspective might seem to preclude the possibility of innovation in contemporary art. This is further entrenched by photography, which is dependent on a limited perspectival formula for a fixed and narrow way of recording the world. My paintings challenge both historic versions of perspective and current photographic realism. Rooted in my experience of looking around the urban environment and moving through it, a multitude of spaces, built upon a mathematics of perspective created uniquely for each painting, are presented seamlessly within a single unified picture. This offers the viewer a compelling vision that is not a facsimile of the real world, but an alternative reality, distinct from the way we experience the world.
"Clive Head" by Michael Paraskos (Lund Humphries) will be published in October to accompany the National Gallery exhibition
Photograph © JOHN GIBBONS
