Grosvenor Gallery and Browse & Darby are pleased to announce the opening of Host, an important solo exhibition of 99 paintings by Mark Shields. The preview is on Thursday 13th February and will be held across two London venues - Grosvenor Gallery in St James's and Browse & Darby on Cork Street.
These recent paintings, painted on muslin and measuring roughly 5ft by 2ft each, are primitive and earthy depictions of solitary figures engaged in apparently commonplace activities but which suggest deeper divine or magical significance. Primal and moving, they are the artist's attempt at a "Frieze of Life".
Although there are 99 separate figures, they have been conceived in pairs and are unified by a kind of wounded hopefulness. They seem at once a troupe of travelling players, a human calendar of days and seasons marked out from the normal flow of history and a visionary attempt to transform the bare conditions of existence.
