An Exhibition of Recent Paintings

PRIVATE VIEW

6 – 8pm Thursday 20th November

The exhibition continues in the gallery until Tuesday 23rd December

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This group of paintings is the first time that I have worked to a brief, albeit a loose and informal brief. When Tom came down from Abbott and Holder to look at my work almost eighteen months ago, he saw a group of paintings on my wall and said that he could imagine an exhibition of similar work (luckily, they were my paintings, and they were recent work). I’ve worked to his brief for a year and a half.

A lot of nonsense is written about painting and I don’t want to add any more.

These paintings aren’t about the objects, the boxes aren’t important, they aren’t supposed to be mysterious, they’re bricks with which to build compositions, and these paintings are about composition, about establishing balance and harmony. I’ve been playing with the grammar and the vocabulary of painting, trying to construct simple formal still lives without any narrative. I have tried to turn limitation, like the shallow depth of my shelf, to advantage as it has forced me to be inventive. In some paintings I made the backdrop, that is the wall behind the objects, the subject of the painting rather than to objects themselves. In a couple of paintings, I established an arc with my ‘bricks’ and I made a series, five paintings, about a diagonal movement across the canvas.There have been weeks when painting has thrown up more ideas than I was able even to begin to develop, and there have also been a couple of times when invention deserted me, when I dried up, my muse went AWOL and another painting seemed impossible, but only ever for a couple of days.

Russell Dorey, October 2025

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Below are a few examples of the paintings that will be included in the exhibition.
Works can be viewed and purchased online from 6pm on Thursday 20th November

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CURRENT LIST

Coming Soon …