Private View "TAKE" at Darbyshire, Wednesday, Sept 12, 6-8 pm

Darbyshire is proud to present three painters working with appropriated images. Each offers a distinct proposition based on shifting the context of an inherited image. 

Chris Hough, Untitled, oil on board
20 x 26cm, 2012

Chris Hough’s practice has been likened to covert easel painting. He pitches up on busy thoroughfares and snatches images by stealth, executing his tiny, hand-held paintings with great speed and technique. He paints shop and restaurant windows, their choreographed public faces. His uncanny paintings prompt a reassessment as they take on a false, staged quality and ask interesting questions about the authorship of these images.

Tony Hull
Candidate 2012
oil on canvas
73 x 56cm

 Tony Hull’s paintings are made slowly over a period of time and in turn relate to the fabric of things through time. He appropriates 16th century Flemish paintings of children and adds references to contemporary iconography and value systems. These deliberately self-conscious additions give rise to a confused melancholy and the paint handling, with images left coming into being, pushes his subjects further into contextual oblivion. 

Vibeke Luther, The Take Down,  2012
oil on canvas
45 x 35cm

Vibeke Luther’s relationship to images is like that of a magpie to shiny objects. If they have the right aura, they’re taken, regardless of genre, history or subject. Once she begins to work with them, her painting is a process of canceling out. It’s like developing a photograph in reverse, where just enough of the original is left to know it has come from somewhere, but it’s hard to say from quite where. Similarly, her titles are snippets of overheard conversations that fit her paintings but relate to things outside of them too.