In its spring exhibition the Gallery Petr Novotný introduces the work of a British artist – Fraser Brocklehurst – whose work is little known here since he has not exhibited much in our country.
Fraser Brocklehurst was born in 1969 in Worth Valley, Yorkshire, UK. In 1989 – 1992 he studied at Manchester Polytechnic. Since the late 1990s he has been living and working in Prague. At first he was concerned with social and cultural research, he worked with video and text, later on he turned to painting. In his early small-size paintings he recorded everyday experiences and recollections of situations, they became a sort of pictorial diary. Later he started painting large-scale paintings which compared to his older ones were completely different as to form and content. His paintings are long and thoroughly premeditated, his canvases are painted in several layers until he arrives at the final one. Under the final painting there are sometimes up to twenty or thirty layers and what at first sight seems to be an almost calligraphic painting done fast with a few brush strokes, is in fact the result of a several months long endeavour. Moreover, his paintings look as if the paint should fall off at any moment, but in reality they are perfectly technologically fixed. This is all a part of the artist´s aim at roughness, naturalness, shabbiness, so that his and our experience is as authentic as possible. The content is as confusing as the form. He often includes animals in his paintings but not because of the animals themselves but to express a more generalizing idea. A painting with a cute little colt suddenly gains a completely different and horrifying meaning when we read its name – Head in bed. The artist said “I have chosen the name Primalex Nights for this exhibition because all the paintings were done at night and I mostly used Primalex paint. Each painting is a result of repeated attempts to create something strong and unique. I need tens of liters of paint for every painting, the coloured emulsion makes this type of work easier, it´s cheap and it dries fast.”
Fraser Brocklehurst exhibited his work at the Gallery Behémót shortly before it closed down and except for a short exhibition of his small-size paintings at the Gallery 207 the current exhibition is the first one after many years. Richard Adam is the only gallery owner who has purchased for his collection a number of Fraser Brocklehurst´s paintings and is planning to exhibit his work in autumn.
