Michael Ashcroft

Since 2001 Ashcroft’s process has involved “copying” into large format paintings seemingly banal landscapes extrapolated from poor quality reproductions found in religious catechisms and travel guides of the 1950s and ‘60s. The artist understands landscape painting as a system of conventions and ideologies ordered in such a way as to show its embedded contradictions. His intention is to reveal the politically charged topographies hiding behind “sublime” views or, as UK critic Michael Wilson writes, “to reinvest the most conventional of all genres with ironically-tuned political bite” (Art Monthly, 2003). His seminal painting series USSR (2001) showed environments promoting ideological superiority through the representation of Russian natural glories. His most recent series God Paintings (2005-06) presents subjects associated with God’s creation of the world through the depiction of natural environments enlarged to supernatural scale to focus on their immediate power and impotent redundancy. Also producing works on paper, Ashcroft’s small oil interventions rearrange the information contained in found illustrations, then presents them in totemic-looking compositions. These play with notions of erasure and addition where the artist changes the meaning of scenes by deleting, for instance, all human presence or, as in Atomic Bomb Studies (2006), cynically superimposing nuclear bomb explosions over tranquil marine bays.

Ashcroft (b. 1974, Preston, UK) lives and works in London. Solo exhibitions include Lucy Mackintosh Gallery (Lausanne) and Max Wigram Gallery (London). Group exhibitions include Exploring Landscape: Eight Views from Britain (2003), Andrea Rosen Gallery (NY) and Death To The Fascist Insect That Preys On The Life Of The People, Anthony d’Offay Gallery / Haunch of Venison (2001, London).

For further information contact the gallery