Alan Michael
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Untitled (Study / Decamp), 2007
Born: 1967, Glasgow
Based: Glasgow
Represented by: David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles; Hotel, London; Modern Art, London; Sorcha Dallas, Glasgow
Born in Glasgow in 1967, Alan Michael gained a BA in Fine Art from Duncan of Jordanstone College, Dundee in 1996 and an MA (Fine Art) from Glasgow School of Art in 1998. Recent exhibitions include Tate Triennial, London, David Kordansky, LA, The Showroom, London, Galerie Guido W. Baudach, Berlin and Modern Art, London. In 2008 Michael had a solo show at the Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh and will exhibit for Art Now at Tate, London in May of this year. Alan Michael lives and works in Glasgow.
Executed in oil and acrylic on canvas, Michael’s paintings form a skewed but precise idiolect of cultural references. Photographs, prints and art-world reproductions are meticulously studied and fascistically transformed – duplicated, rotated, spliced and inter-married. His iconic hybrids encompassing Lucian Freud, Horst, Balthus, Andrew Wyeth and – more recently – Lynne Ramsey’s film Morvern Callar are doppelgangers of both hegemonic and sub-cultures, middlebrows and avant-gardes. The resultant images deny both unctuousness and hysteria at the compulsive level of their masterful – yet quirkily handled – substance, fashioning angular (and thoroughly painterly) chimeras at a deadpan remove from their subjects.
