Martin Maloney: Actress Slash Model
Timothy Taylor Gallery is delighted to present a series of new works by Martin Maloney. Taking as a starting point the banal, semi-nude female models that appear daily in British tabloid newspapers, Maloney reconstructs their playful poses in large-scale collages and works on paper to be shown in both the Carlos Place and Dering Street galleries.
Bold, amusing and varied, these collages are a continuation of a body of work that mixes high-art reference with pop-cultural influences. Maloney uses an intuitive and seemingly Expressionist style to examine the classic art historical genre of the female nude. The buxom bodies of young, fleshy ingénues are collaged in blocks of colour taken from previously painted and discarded canvases. Figurative and strikingly graphic, these works are infiltrated with the complexity of abstraction. Recycling and reforming his own work, Maloney takes something old to make something new.
Maloney works in a free way without preliminary studies or any idea of the look of the final piece. Complimentary and contradictory colour, texture and pattern are juxtaposed on the canvas creating a complex and varied surface. Flat expanses of paint and wild, intricate patterns lie against daring leaps of colour and vigorous brushwork and are held together on the raw canvas background with the trace of a charcoal outline. Although absorbed by art history, the works are immediately accessible and allow the viewer to create their own narrative; Ruby Green is a flame-haired, strong woman who stares directly at the viewer with piercing blue eyes; Kali leans suggestively away and smiles; Kitten strikes an archetypal glamour pose, while Lolita, with her raven pigtails, is at once burlesque icon and school girl.
In the Dering Street gallery, Maloney will show both black and white and coloured works on paper. Influenced by Willem de Kooning’s women, the carefully composed abstract drawings of the Russian avant-garde, and Cy Twombly’s energetic calligraphic mark-making, Maloney’s monochromatic textured graphite rubbings and apparently uncontrolled coloured scribbles are cut up and carefully arranged to make recognisable images of glamorous women.
Born in London in 1961, Maloney went to Central Saint Martin’s College of Art and Goldsmiths College, leaving in 1993. Solo exhibitions have included Johnen & Schottle Cologne, (1998), Anthony d’Offay, London, (2000), Delfina Project Space, London, (2001), Gian Ferrari Arte Contemporanea, Milan, (2003), Xavier Hufkens, Brussels, (2004), Galerie Xippas, Paris, (2005), Baldwin Gallery, Aspen, (2007) and Tatintsian Gallery, Moscow, (2007). Group shows have included Sensation, Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection, Royal Academy of Arts, London, (1997),Die Young Stay Pretty, ICA, London, (1998), Neurotic Realism, Saatchi Gallery, London, (1999), Family Fortunes, National Gallery, London, (2001), New Labour, Saatchi Gallery, London, (2001), The Rowan Collection, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, (2002), Neue Kunsthalle IV: Direct Painting, Kunsthalle Mannheim, Mannheim, (2004),Behind Innocence Gallery, Hyundai Gallery, Korea, (2006), Youth of Today, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, (2006). Maloney last showed at Timothy Taylor Gallery in 2005.
