Collection news

One of the artists in the running for this year’s Turner Prize is George Shaw who is represented in the University art collection with one of his trademark urban paintings and a series of twelve atmospheric etchings.

The painting Scenes from the Passion: The Swing is currently hanging in the Arts Centre near the entrance to the Mead Gallery. Nine of the etchings are on display in the Education Building at Westwood and three others can be seen in Scarman House.

Shaw is an unusual candidate for the Turner Prize in that his work is figurative and concerned with what on the face of it seems to reflect mundane aspects of contemporary life. His landscapes depict his reflections of and emotional responses to the Tile Hill council estate in Coventry where he grew up.

They are landscapes that contain a strange mix of fact and fiction. The fiction is provided by Shaw’s use of Humbrol, which limits his palette to the glossy colours of industry, not those of nature. The green of the grass echoes that of Racing Green motor cars more than the green of a garden. The fact comes from his subject matter, not the idealised landscapes of Constable, but the very real urban locations that landscape painters usually avoid. For example a row of garages with a door hanging askew, a derelict pub, a wall with graffiti and in our case a swing frame that is missing its swings. However even the factual elements of the work have been subtly altered. Whilst the start of the work is a photographic image the finished piece is not always a faithful representation of the original.

The results of the Turner Prize competition will be announced on Channel 4 on the 5^th December. Meanwhile you can also see some of Shaw’s work at an excellent retrospective exhibition at the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum in Coventry which runs until the 11^th March 2012.