Martin Maloney: New Paintings
Timothy Taylor Gallery is pleased to present Martin Maloney’s first solo exhibition of new paintings in London since 2001. For this show, Maloney has painted thirteen, large-scale canvases of the urban landscape and the people that inhabit it.
Preoccupied by his immediate social surroundings, Maloney’s new body of paintings present images of city and suburban life against a backdrop of housing estates, shopping precincts, office blocks, schools and museums. Looking at institutions and environments created within a utopian concept, Maloney identifies and enjoys the opposition between what the state has provided and how people have been able to live within it. A sense of celebration pervades much of the work, emphasised by the use of intensely bright colour and oblique reference to a pastoral idyll.
Maloney paints instinctively, drawing on memory and casual observation, without preliminary studies or any conception of the final outcome. The works are painted directly with an uninhibited gestural energy. These paintings operate as snap shots of the urban landscape. Complex in pictorial space and varied in composition, they echo the discordance of the mass and jumble of the real world. Decoration and patterning function both as a depiction of clothing, buildings, trees, flowers and as structural devices that create a believable, actual space occupied by real people.
Throughout his career, Maloney has continued to make work at once obvious, apparently simple and yet deceptively complex. The inherent narrative is determined by the viewer who brings his or her own ideas and understanding to it. This ambiguity is apparent in his titles, for example Saplings, which refers at once to the trussed up young trees, and also to the adolescent girls who dominate the foreground. In Public Sculpture, three women, perhaps office girls on their lunch break, pose, reminiscent of recumbent Henry Moore figures, the actual public sculpture only just visible in the distance, outside their municipal building.