Jack Bell Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new paintings by Ransome Stanley.
Ransome draws on images from bourgeois culture of the nineteenth century, Western images of Africa and colonial clichés of exoticism to raise questions about race and identity. He uses the media in its various forms as an archive, from which he selects and combines imagery. His paintings are often populated with photo-realistic portraits in dialogue with animals, literature or a picture within a picture.
Glimpses of worn old fences, crumbling walls and cracked wooden boards create the layering of urban graffiti. Ransome's scrawled writing and half torn posters are far from anonymous and spontaneous. The corrosion and decaying of materials - bleached and peeling paint, rotten wood and rusty nails - is executed artificially with masterful skill. In contemporary German art, comparisons could be drawn to Anselm Kiefer and Neo Rauch in their experimentations with texures, alchemy and memory.
Stanley is based in Munich, Germany. He was born in 1953 in London to a Nigerian father and a German mother. The artist has shown widely internationally and participated in important exhibitions at the Haus der Kunst, Munich, Deutsche Gesellschaft für Christliche Kunst, Munich, Kunsthaus, Dresden, Kunstarkaden, Munich, Stadthalle, Germering, Kunstverein, Aschau, Musée D´Ixelles, Brüssel and the Museum der Weltkulturen, Frankfurt among others. This will be his first exhibition in London.