Howard Dyke
Private View: 17th December 2012 – 10 January 2013
Vigo gallery is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of paintings by Howard Dyke.
Dyke works quickly and intuitively with collaged photographic and painted imagery. He uses found materials from cardboard and polyester table covers to functional sample colour charts and industrial wrapping tape. Raiding styles as diverse as 90's process painting to 50's abstraction and Schwitteresque material gathering. Dyke uses charged imagery foraged for in newspapers and the Internet as a starting point for his exploration and will tend to investigate a theme over many works. The final reckoning of each one is not an illustration of the source material but a multilayered interpretation of it. With these Burqua paintings Dyke is using the shape as an iconic anchor in which to harness his vibrant and violent but at the same time lyrical paintings. The Burqua is the starting point, a striking visual image. The work is not political or rather is not stating an opinion. The imagery is still loaded but it also talks of layers and degrees of expression, of content and complexity.
He aims to let the paint describe the image emotively; working fast but using the collage elements to then change the pace. These elements migrate around the studio from painting to painting, changing destination until they sit uncomfortably in their new surroundings. With a punk like gratitude to the abstract expressionists, Art Povera and the Dadaists, he is producing layered work that is built, destroyed and rebuilt many times, constantly pushing or risking the whole, layering the visual information again and again and revisiting and changing the nature of successful works. The scars from previous paintings are evident, bloodied, bruised, stabbed and cut. The palette is unapologetic, shiny, matt, lurid, soiled, patterned, industrial, hard and soft, happy and angry.
Dyke says; “I'm an image hunter. The ones I choose, daily news images from the Internet, remind me of paintings I want to make. They have abstract qualities, space and gesture. The photos for the series of Burqua paintings that I have been working on were chosen for their painterly qualities. It's usually a domestic setting. I felt the veiled women were enigmatic, crying out to be taken seriously,
attention seeking even. I liked the spatial flow of the cloth, the weight of the image and also its lightness, which I wanted to convey, the expression of freedom through repression. The veil has a painterly quality. The painted surface reveals and conceals, a skin and also a painted skin.
These works have a freedom that goes beyond the consideration of the individual painting. Sometimes one painting leads to another; sometimes one painting becomes part of another only to be obliterated by the sudden introduction of a new colour or collage or found material. Matthew Collings says, “His lay-outs and his rich painterly space zing off each other and are mutually dependent, genuinely mutually energising.”
Howard Dyke was born in 1971 in London. He holds an MA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths and a Ba in Fine Art from Central St Martins College of Art & Design.
Solo exhibitions include: Dance of the Techno Polar Bear, Acme Project Space, London, 2009. Selected group exhibitions include: Law of the Jungle, Lehmann Maupin, New York, USA, 2011; The Marmite Prize for Painting, studio 1.1, London, 2008. Dyke was awarded the Jessica Wilkes Award 2008/09. He has had two solo shows over the last two years with Charlie Dutton Gallery and was included in ‘London Twelve’ at the City of Prague Gallery this summer. His work is in many good collections including those of Saatchi and Beth de Woody. He is represented by Vigo Gallery.
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