Latest Shape collaboration: Exhibiting artist for the ARMB Shortlist 6, 2014 and ARMB Shortlist 9, 2017

Artist Statement: David Lock’s paintings utilise a collagist approach. In the process of creating his ‘Misfit’ paintings, he makes collages culled from advertisements and imagery from mainstream magazines. In their making, the collages and subsequent paintings have a performative quality. In this regard, he is seeking to undermine the original source material, disrupting its meaning in order to create a new experimental man, akin to Frankenstein’s monster. A subject divided against itself as the effect of a loss.

Lock is investigating how to create a multitude of subject positions, upon which signifiers are free to float, shifting identification from one fragment to another. His paintings resist a single reading or viewpoint, instead any reading of the portrait is unmoored, fluid and contingent. A sense of vulnerability is reinforced by the paintings being composed from collaged elements.

At the heart of the work there is a sense of loss. The lacunae of the lost objects from which these fragments were a part.

Lock’s motivations for the use of the male, exposes an underlying uncertainty about the male’s status in contemporary culture and the role he should fulfil within it.

                           'El Muniria' (2017); Oil on Canvas, Collection of Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool

Check out David's website   See all the artists we work with

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Banner image: Section of Misfits (Garden), oil on linen, 2019. Description: A painting in blocked bright colours of two male figures with their chest showing next to each other in front of plants and a fence.