CUBE

18.10.00 – 21.01.01

Alison Turnbull is an established British artist. She has collaborated with a number of architectural practices and her paintings are included in various public and private collections, including The Arts Council, The British Council and Deutsche Bank, London.

The images are generated by found architectural plans, sections and elevations, representing public and domestic buildings from around the world. Sourced from books, maps, antique plans and the Internet, and floated onto subtly coloured fields, these plans become tokens of that process of conversion of drawing into painting, of a diagram into a picture. Through her technique of layering and abrading the surfaces of her paintings, Turnbull subjects each architectural blueprint to a kind of archaeology and has likened the series to building an imaginary town or evoking the exigencies and pleasures of daily life.

Works include:

Airport
Oil &acrylic on canvas on board

A drawing of Tokyo's Narita Airport generated this painting. An anonymous diagram taken from the Internet was transferred to canvas by the 'spolvero' technique used in Renaissance fresco cycles. The synthetic harmony of the colours, however, is typically Japanese and Airport is the only painting in which the colour is given by the original source, rather than invented.

Zoo
Oil on linen

The ground plan of the zoological gardens in Calcutta comes from a 1911 map of the city and the parchment - coloured creaminess of the painted ground echoes the faded paper of the old map. The dispersal of the shapes across the canvas is in contrast to the essentially symmetrical and frontal placement of most of the other images in the series.

Spa

A book on spa architecture in the Catalan Pyrenees is the source for the image. It is not just the intense blue of the painting that evokes water - the small, dense image of the spa seems to float on the surface of the painting, whereas the background image shifts and fragments, like something seen through water at the bottom of a pool.

School
Oil & acrylic on linen on board

School, the final painting in the series, takes a diagram of a school designed in Puerto Rico around 1900 as its starting point. It is important to Alison Turnbull that the school is in Latin America; she was born there and during her childhood her father was involved in school-building programmes in South and Central America. As well as representing education, the idea of a school evokes memories of childhood.

 

Organised by Graeme Russell
Curated by Milton Keynes Art Gallery