Barry Thompson: Bleeding for the light

Barry Thompson's first solo exhibition at the gallery, including exquisite miniature landscape oil paintings and pencil drawings that reference the sites and experiences of his adolescence.

Barry Thompson, a graduate of the Royal College of Art in 2005, is recognized for his impeccable miniature landscape paintings and figurative drawings. 

Having grown up in Essex, Thompson references the sites and experiences of his childhood and adolescent years. We might consider his landscapes as a setting of the scene where activities and rites of passages would occur: a place of escape in an apparently rural area which was in reality the urban wrapped wastelands of Dagenham and nearby. 

Within this locale, Thompson would act out fantasies during his adolescence, and it is these experiences that inform his drawings, leading to series depicting soldiers, birds, rock stars and pornographic motifs. 

In this exhibition Thompson continues to combine source material that signifies an ongoing exploration of the historical and the autobiographical, blurring the boundaries between fiction and reality; self and other; past and present. He has progressed from depicting First World War soldiers from the Artists Rifles regiment, who were based in his home town of Romford, to a combination of those with shell shock and characters from Stanley Kubrick’s ‘Full Metal Jacket’, which explored the psychological pressures undergone during military training. 

In his erotic drawings, Thompson depicts Mary Millington, a 1970’s model and actress. Millington suffered from depression and eventually committed suicide with a cocktail of vodka and medication that Thompson himself takes. In combination with landscapes that suggest the hallucinatory or transcendental, and studies of graffiti strewn trees, Thompson presents us with a body of work that interrogates psychological disturbance; the metaphysical; performance; nostalgia; creativity; and ultimately the self.

The event will take place at CHARLIE SMITH LONDON, 336 Old Street, Shoreditch, London EC1V 9DR. Open from 11am-6pm Wed to Sat. Please contact the gallery for further information on 020 7739 4055. Follow us @CHARLIESMITHIdn

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Artists: Barry Thompson

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Time: 11:00 am to 6:00 pm Category: Arts | Visual Arts | Galleries / Art