Dean's paintings question the way in which we look at images in art. Using her non-writing hand to overcome the control exerted by the conscious mind, Dean makes paintings that explore perspective and the singularity of the mind's eye in framing and authorship. Using the contingency of found pictures on the internet, the compositions are framed as receding stages or galleries. We see walls, floors, ceilings and separated rooms emerge from blind alleys, dead ends and shifting horizons. The digital world is a multiverse of images in which our attention is manipulated to focus on what is narrow and commercially and politically expedient. By painting numerous images within one painting, Dean distracts or prevents us from focussing on one subject - making us aware of both the mind's natural control and society's. The original images come from a variety of cultural, geographical and historical sources and te painting process assembles these disparate images into a world of staged inevitability.
Judith Dean (b. 1965, Billericay, UK) lives and works in London and graduated from Wimbledon School of Art, London (1988) and Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam (1993). Recent selected exhibitions include The World Was All Before Them, TULCA (Ireland, 2022), The Void, White Columns Online curated by Daisy Sanchez (New York, 2021), twelve years in the making, Galeria Cadaqués (Spain, 2019) and 1D for Abroad, Tintype (London, 2019). Since her first solo in 1990, Dean has exhibited extensively internationally including exhibitions/performances at Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia (1997) and in Germany, Japan, Czech Republic and France, with solo exhibitions at Hales (London, 1997 & 2000. Dean was also the winner of the Jerwood Sculpture Prize (2005) and is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Bristol.
