Paul Winstanley

Paul Winstanley, Lounge A, oil on linen, 120cm x 112cm, 1997.

Paul Winstanley is a British painter and photographer based in London. Since the late 1980s, he has been known for meticulously rendered, photo-based paintings of uninhabited, commonplace, semi-public interiors and nondescript landscapes viewed through interior or vehicle windows. He marries traditional values of the still life and landscape genres—the painstaking transcription of color, light, atmosphere and detail—with contemporary technology and sensibilities, such as the sparseness of minimalism. His work investigates observation and memory, the process of making and viewing paintings, and the collective post-modern experience of utopian modernist architecture and social space. Critics such as Adrian Searle and Mark Durden have written that Winstanley's art has confronted "a crisis in painting," exploring mimesis and meditation in conjunction with photography and video; they suggest he "deliberately confuses painting's ontology" in order to potentially reconcile it with those mediums.

Winstanley has exhibited at institutions including the Tate, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MoCA LA), Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA), Royal Academy of Arts (London), Esbjerg Kunstmuseum (Denmark), Walker Art Center, and Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego. His work belongs to the public collections of the Museum of Modern Art, British Council, MoCA LA, IMMA, among others.

Education and career Winstanley was born in Manchester, United Kingdom in 1954. His early paintings and works on paper focused on abstract structural principles and were influenced by American minimalist painters such as Brice Marden and Robert Ryman. In his later career he has had solo shows at the Tate and Cristea Roberts Gallery in London, Kerlin Gallery (Dublin), Galerie Vera Munro (Hamburg), and Galerie Andreas Binder (Munich), among others. In 2008, Artspace in New Zealand mounted a retrospective of his work.

Work and reception Since the late 1980s Winstanley's art has mainly focused on large, realistically rendered oil paintings that merge modernist aesthetics and postmodern investigation with two classical genres, the interior and the landscape. Critics have described his style as an "indistinct naturalism" combining painterly softness and invisible technique, a meticulous dispassionate recording of observation and photographic detail (including flaws such as lens flare and the hazing of contours), and the subjective alteration of composition, light and color from source materials. The images consisted of planes of white and gradations of gray punctuated by identifiable details of art-school activity: improvised partitioned spaces, battered and paint-dripped walls and floors, plastered-over drill holes, baseboard heaters, well-used sinks and random stackable chairs (e.g., Seminar (Grey) or Art School 28, 2014).

Collections Winstanley's work belongs to the public collections of the Arts Council of Great Britain, British Council, Colby College Museum of Art, Fonds national d'art contemporain (FNAC, Paris), Irish Museum of Modern Art, SACEM, and Tate, among others.