LEE SELLERS, 06-21 December 2012

Private View Wednesday 05 December 6-8pm
http://www.curwengallery.co.uk/gallery/sellers12/title.htm

Lee Sellers’ playful paintings illustrate moments in time between people in different scenarios. He often depicts groups of people, each going about their own business, which upon closer inspection show various narratives all playing out at once.

A scene is set on a sandy beach, a busy harbour or the location may be a TV filming studio. Sellers then adds in the characters that bring the painting to life. These are sometimes purely imagined scenarios, but others are real situations he has been in. Maybe it is Sellers’ experience of working in TV as an actor himself that leads him to construct these scenes as a director would organise his cast, giving each tiny painted figure a role. In a street scene, a man enters a shop, whilst two friends stand chatting outside, and at a window high up above, a small child’s face is pressed up against the glass looking out. It’s the more hidden figures that are such a joy to discover, and they can often be found hiding around the edge of the canvas. Looking here, for example in a painting of a party scene, the viewer may see a couple that have moved away from the crowd for a secret kiss.

A scene is set on a sandy beach, a busy harbour or the location may be a TV filming studio. Sellers then adds in the characters that bring the painting to life. These are sometimes purely imagined scenarios, but others are real situations he has been in. Maybe it is Sellers’ experience of working in TV as an actor himself that leads him to construct these scenes as a director would organise his cast, giving each tiny painted figure a role. In a street scene, a man enters a shop, whilst two friends stand chatting outside, and at a window high up above, a small child’s face is pressed up against the glass looking out. It’s the more hidden figures that are such a joy to discover, and they can often be found hiding around the edge of the canvas. Looking here, for example in a painting of a party scene, the viewer may see a couple that have moved away from the crowd for a secret kiss.

Some figures even escape from the canvas altogether and are shown leaping out of the picture onto the surrounding wall. In works like these, Sellers plays with the idea of the boundaries of a painting, and in the most refreshing and unselfconscious way, disregards many of the traditional rules.

He uses the canvas as an object not just for these figures to be painted on to, but for them to interact with. Sometimes they are even armed with a paintbrush and can be seen painting a part of the scene themselves.

Lee Sellers lives and works in London, and has shown with Curwen Gallery since 2010. This is his first solo show at Curwen.