George Shaw is the National Gallery’s ninth Rootstein Hopkins Associate Artist.

http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/learning/associate-artist-scheme/george-shaw

George Shaw often uses a very wry sense of observation to filter his thoughts on formulas of Romantic & Gothic when expanding the concerns of contemporary urban & country landscapes. The writers Gordon Burn and J.G.Ballard are touchstones. The contrast between British comedy and Surrealism are contextually useful in understanding how Shaw negotiates notions of the sublime and exotic travel.

Perhaps no British since Constable has so intensely studied a personal environment, in this case Tile Hill, a suburb of West Coventry.
George Shaw a past Turner Prize nominee, is the artist in residence at the National Gallery. In his last show at the Wilkinson Gallery he drew to a close the artistic relationship with his primary subject matter.

George is famed for re-imagining the British Landsape through sharp analysis and a reshaping of the romantic and Gothic traditions. Shaw is emphatically a painter of Ghosts. Recording ghost stories played out amongst brutalist urban design of post war Britain.

Shaw’s paintings are essentially self-portraits, containing a personal realism that reflects a certain postwar experience, tapping into the tradition of the Gothic ruin – only unrecognised because they are contemporary. This is significant artists of Shaw’s calibre do best. They let us see our own times more clearly, they recognise new beauty and question the common currency how this is identified.

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Some of the acute social observation developed from the close collaborations with Gordon Burn, writer of On The Way To Work : interviews with Damien Hirst and Somebody’s Husband (echoing the interviews of Francis Bacon with David Silvester), Somebody’s Son: The Story Of Peter Sutcliffe. Shaw has a notable love for the writing of J.G.Ballard.

In the agnostic, 14 paintings of the cross, Shaw was naturally drawn to the uncanny disturbances found in wooded areas, offering mediation’s on what, the projections we make mean about ourselves. It’s fascinating to see how this plays out as he responds to landscapes in the Nation Gallery’s collection

There were plenty of hints at the Last Days of Belief exhibition at the Wilkinson Gallery, eight near black/brown monochrome nocturnes, of roads reminiscent of David Lynch films – heading out of the distinctive housing estate.

Typically Shaw, these don’t quite conform to the vanishing horizon of romantic painting, instead they pleasurably wrong foot the public by turning around the corner.

These were painted in a loose style, where source photography was barely referenced.

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The artist essentially paints ghosts. Being of the Genius Loci, school of thought that “when the artist or poet leaves a place, that place leaves with them”, his cityscapes are always devoid of people