Tony Bevan. Construct

26 Nov-22 Dec 2009

Overview

From Bevan's earliest days, interiors have coexisted with portraits and figures, and his work has increasingly divided into interiors with corridors, rafters and studio furniture, on the one hand, and figures and portraits on the other. The fluidity of Bevan's pictorial language allows the artist to create a fascinating interplay between these bodies of work. Heads are constructed, as though by scaffolding, and architecture is given a skeletal or even fleshy presence. The motif is based on something tangible in the real world that undergoes a process of transformation in which the subject may be imaginatively recreated from an array of superficially random lines. In each case the grip on structure is tight and the result is a new creation that formally gains much of its power from the way in which the subject is abstracted from its origins.