Main Gallery

Daniel Sturgis

Strict and Lax

4 September - 4 October, 2014

Dan Sturgis installation image Dan Sturgis installation image Dan Sturgis installation image Dan Sturgis installation image Dan Sturgis, Position and Accord, 2014, acrylic on canvas, 120 x 165 cm Dan Sturgis, Learning to Fail, 2014, acrylic on canvas, 153 x 183 cm Dan Sturgis, Shine on me, 2014, acrylic on canvas, 183 x 183 cm

Art First initiates its representation of Daniel Sturgis with our forthcoming exhibition devoted to his new work Strict and Lax. We are delighted to be presenting this thought-provoking and intellectually rigorous practitioner whose work is already celebrated internationally.

Sturgis has an exhibiting history starting in the mid-90’s and an esteemed position as teacher and curator, most recently with Tate St Ives / Mead Gallery’s The Indiscipline of Painting (2011-2012) conceived and largely selected by him. The art historian Alison Green writes in the catalogue:

“Sturgis’s work provokes precise questions about flatness in both its visual and philosophical dimensions. … (this) his paintings have situated across both digital and analogue realms, which is, in fact, closer to what the world is like.”

There will be a series of paintings on canvas and on paper to continue his dizzying / joyful / spell-like investigations through ‘shape and form’ into the languages and lineage of abstract painting, whilst we have invited the critic Charles Darwent to contribute a new essay to be included in the exhibition publication.