Skip Navigation

Mark Shields: Here and Elsewhere

21st April 2010 - 18th May 2010

Catalogue now available to view online:
Click on below image to maximize to fullscreen.




In December 2008 the Grosvenor Gallery presented Colloquy, the 6th solo exhibition of the work of Belfast- based painter Mark Shields. These large scale pastels on canvas marked a departure from his previous work with figure compositions of growing simplicity and less literal pictorial architecture which led the writer and painter William Packer to recognise in them "an expansiveness and freedom of statement.....a more direct account of the human and spiritual condition." He asked with anticipation, "to what will they lead?"

Now with the exhibition 'Here and Elsewhere' we can see how Shields has developed these ideas in an extraordinary group of paintings which show an intriguing blend of raw immediacy with a subtle balance of tones, forms and gestures. The hieratic stillness characteristic of former work remains, but a more primitive distillation dominates. Enigmatic human encounters represented in lighter tones and stronger colours than previously have an earthy convincingness. Matte, fresco-like surfaces, abraded and spattered as though marked with the passage of the ages, combine with the imagery to suggest a timeless archetypal significance. Two wrestling figures conjure thoughts of Jacob and the Angel. A rugged village couple have become the eternal wanderers. The Here and Elsewhere of the title is suggested on different levels. The figures themselves, mostly coupled, are inextricably linked with each other yet they often appear to inhabit quite separate plains. Here and Elsewhere. Again, the paintings depict believable scenarios- three girls daydreaming, a poet at his desk- yet one senses that the Here of the depiction is merely a visual clue to a transcendent Elsewhere. And then one senses that the painter himself is both Here at the materialisation of the work and Elsewhere as he recognises the echoes of other periods and cultures in his expression of the endlessly repeated themes of human existence; of love and suffering, chaos and order, doubt and belief, the sacred and the sensual, the temporal and the eternal. In these he identifies with his ancestors as though the most ancient of times were present with him still. Here and Elsewhere.