John Tiney

7 Sep-13 Oct 2012

Overview

Tiney’s work takes disparate elements from popular culture and the everyday and marries them into his work, exploring the notion of illusion and duality through contemporary and historical reference. His work is known for its power to adopt and adapt collected materials from an eclectic range of sources and grafting the real into fiction, and vice versa. The new paintings are comically melodramatic reflection of notions of art that are full of emblems of self-exposure. A series of singular definite, bold enlarged brushstrokes, which are reminiscent of Howard Hodgkin and Roy Lichtenstein are the starting point for reappropriation. However, these marks are more designed gestures opposed to evocative mark making. Tiney then inserts freakish, irritating cartoon characters – those popular with the middle class in the 1960s and 1970s when they were seen on greeting cards; stereotypical displays of emotion.