Chapman & Bailey Gallery

The Postal Workers' Social Club
Richard Denny -  Recent Work

10 – 29 September, 2012

Opening - Tuesday 11th September, 6-8pm
For more info / to view images click
Download Exhibition Catalogue click

Chapman & Bailey Gallery is delighted to present The Postal Workers' Social Club, a body of new work by Melbourne-based artist Richard Denny.

In these layered, bold compositions, members of The Post Office Worker's Social Club in a very small fictional European state quizzically return our gaze. The workers are often doubly flattened, painted within the painting and framed within the frame, and sandwiched between.

Denny's signature layered vintage maps. Within the logic of Denny's fictional world this makes sense: the Twelfth Club is a painting club, and the workers of the Postal Service have painted themselves. This layering of fact within fiction, also works its way back out to the “real” world.

The Postal Worker's Social Club finds an echo in the Ashington Group, a society of untrained artists comprised of British coal miners founded in 1934 and active until the 1980s. Like the “kitchen sink” art of social realism, the banal interiors and everyday encounters in Denny's series form an appealing fictional social record. Twentieth-century French painter Jean Dubuffet sought an “art which would start from this daily life...[forming] very direct and very sincere expressions of our real life and real moods.” Drawing on this, Denny's vivid body of work nonetheless plays out a charming internal logic of its own.

Richard Denny is a British-born artist who lives and works in Melbourne. 

This will be his 12th solo exhibition and his 3rd exhibition at Chapman & Bailey Gallery.

Opening - Tuesday 11th September, 6-8pm

For more info / to view images click
Download exhibition catalogue click

www.isthemaptheterritory.com

The exhibition runs from 10th - 29th September 2012 at Chapman & Bailey, 350 Johnston St, Abbotsford. 

T: 03 9415 8666   E: gallery@chapmanbailey.com.au