THIS BE THY HOUR. DANCE ART COLLABORATION WITH STEPHEN PELTON DANCE THEATER

In October 2024 the annual O+ Festival in Kingston New York hosted a collaboration with Gavin Maughfling and London-based American choreographer Stephen Pelton. Two paintings, measuring in total 40 ft x 9, formed a part of 'This Be Thy Hour", a contemporary dance performance featuring Ed Mitten and Nol Simonse. The work will travel to London later in 2025.

EXCERPT FROM FESTIVAL TEXT.

 " The starting point for this set design was a series of paintings I made based on Alain Guiraudie’s 2013 film ‘Stranger by the Lake’. I was interested in the range of interactions and emotions the film explores, from erotic desire to the ways lust can blind us to danger, and the painful contradiction of a basic human need for companionship existing within a context of alienating loneliness. The restriction of the film to a lakeside cruising ground and the role played by the landscape resonated with my own exploration of paintings as an arena or stage, into which characters leave, act, and then depart. After conversations with the choreographer Stephen Pelton, and my own earlier interest in the in potential for collaboration between visual art and dance, I created a large-scale set design referencing these paintings. The work operates as a frieze, constructing a loose, non-illustrative narrative from the entry of the protagonist into the space through his searching out and acting on erotic desire and to a final satiation. The painting travels from afternoon to night and sits in a kind of unspoken dialogue with the dance that plays out in front of it."

Gavin Maughfling, 2024

This Be Thy Hour. Art Dance Collaboration with Stephen Pelton at the O+ Festival, Kingston New York

Looking at Tigers

Solo Pop Up Exhibiton at Bermondsey Project Space,

July 5 - July 6 from 11-6.

Private View Friday July 5 from 6-9

https://project-space.london/looking-at-tigers-gavin-maughfling-july-pop-up-2

Looking at Tigers, Bermondsey Project Space, July 5-6 2024

Recent works by Gavin Maughfling will be shown in a solo pop up solo exhibition at Bermondsey Project Space, London in July 2024.

Private View Friday July 5

Solo Exhibition, Bermondsey Poject Space London, July 2024

'Lift' was selected for  'Assembly', a painting show curated by Paula MacArthur with members of Contemporary British Painting and invited artists, at Rye Creative Centre, May 2024.

Assembly, Rye Creative Centre

'Departure' was selected for Newcastle X, a major retrospective of work marking ten years of Contemporary British Painting.

Newcastle X, June 2023

March 2023. Invited to join British Contemporary Painting.

Website:  https://www.contemporarybritishpainting.com/

IG: @paintbritain

Invited to join Contemporary British Painting

Invited by Moca London to be featured in the gallery's web exhibition programme. There are two parts to the Moca web programme: a web page with twelve paintings from the artist's most recent series with a supporting text, and an Instagram feed running  through January and February, showcasing eight paintings and four film scans panning across the surface. of the paintings.

With Many Thanks to all at Moca London; to Michael Petry, to Roberto Eckholm and to Viola Farinella.

https://www.moca.london/we_gavinmaughfling.html

https://www.instagram.com/mocalondon_we/

Web Exhibition Artist, Moca London. January - February 2023

'Dust' and 'The Wall' were slected for the 2022 Beep Painting Biennial Prize, exhibited at the Elysium Gallery, Swansea from July 29-September 10, 2022.

http://www.beeppaintingbiennial.com/

Beep Painting Biennial Painting Prize 2022

2022 Queer Frontiers Exhibition, held at 7-9 Walker Court, Soho from  29 June to 29 July.

Queer Frontiers 2022

As a part of their celebration LGBTQIA+ Month, featuring exhibitions, film showings, discussion panels,  performances and spoken word events, Bermondsey Project Space is showing 'Figure and Ground', a group exhibition which brings together works by KV Duong, Radek Husak, Gavin Maughfling and James Robert Morrison.
 

The artists in Figure and Ground explore real and dreamt spaces as a rebellion against heteronormative environments and present new psychological realities to escape to. Thee gallery has created an online catalogue for this exhibition.

https://project-space.london/figure-and-ground

Exhibition dates: 15 - 26 February. 

Private View 16 February, 6 - 9

Meet the Artists closing event, 26 February, 2 - 5

Figure and Ground at Bermondsey Project Space

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

Gavin Maughfling

no format Gallery

Casting House, Moulding Lane, off Arklow Road, Deptford, SE14 6BN

Private View Wednesday November 24, 6 - 9 PM

Exhibition runs November 25 - 28

Opening hours: Thursday & Friday 2 – 5 PM, Saturday and Sunday 1 – 6 PM

Artist talk: Saturday November  27, 3 – 5 PM

These new paintings reach beyond the specific narrative of the photographic image. Originating in Alain Guiraudie’s 2013 film L’Inconnu du lac, as well as in found images of cruising sites, they explore themes of loneliness and casual rejection; of hope and waiting; of sudden and unexpected acts of kindness and queer companionship; of the collision of desire and danger; and of the role of their landscapes, which appear to both witness and reflect and ultimately absorb the events they contain.

 Engaging in part in a conversation with the history of narrative painting and scenes of Arcady and myth, reset in a contemporary context, their pictorial spaces work as theatrical stages. The landscapes are arenas into which the protagonists enter and play out different dramas of desire, waiting, rejection, encounter, sex and vanishing. Behind them is an ever-present echo of Titian’s two Diana Acteon paintings. Acteon the hunter pulls back the curtain, making us the viewers complicit in his own voyeurism. In his death, the landscape is witness to a small event unseen by human eye, and when the action has passed, will return again to its mute emptiness on a blustery autumn afternoon.

Gavin Maughfling’s recent exhibitions include Beep Painting Biennial, Elysium Gallery 2020, between parts undone, studio1.1 Gallery London, 2020; Creekside Open 2019, APT London; Artworks 2019, Barbican Art Trust; Did You See Me Coming?, no format Gallery 2019; Beyond the Binaries, House of St. Barnabas, London 2018, Ghost on the Wire 2, Objectifs, Singapore 2016 and Over Time at the University of Greenwich and National Maritime Museum 2014. With Suzanne de Emmony, he has co-curated major international exhibitions in the UK and Singapore. He is currently working with Steph Goodger on Pull Back The Curtain, a project that explores unseen but sensed traces of events, with a forthcoming exhibition at Rosalux Galley, Berlin.

Gallery conversation with Gavin Maughfling and Steph Goodger:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWdPguyIgviOpXjyxwtCDRQ

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

'Aftermath' was selected by Enzo Marra and Steph Goodger for exhibition in the Beep Paiunting Biennial 2020, held at the Elysium Gallery, Swansea.

https://www.beeppainting.com/

Beep Painting Biennial 2020

between parts undone

PAINTINGS BY DAVID LOCK, GAVIN MAUGHFLING AND J.A. NICHOLLS

studio1.1, 57A Redchurch Street, Shoreditch, London E2 7DJ

7 February - 1 March 2020

Private View: 6 February, 6 - 9 pm

Open: Thursday - Sunday, 12 - 6 pm or by appointment

Email: info@studio1-1.co.uk

Tel: 07952 986 696

Artist talk with Sacha Craddock: Sunday 9 February at 3 pm

PRESS RELEASE

" … identity will always be something that must be created. What we have on our hands is something that is essentially unfinished. Instead of looking for repose, instead of looking for some collective or individual "end of gay history" in the complete and full adequation of oneself, we had better accept the inevitably provisional unforeseeable character - on both the individual and collective levels - of what it means to be gay." 

Didier Eribon, 'Insult and the Making of the Gay Self'.

Our painting practices, in different ways, draw on some form of collage process, either manually or in the use of digital layering. To quote J. A. Nicholls : “ There’s something pleasingly excessive going on, beyond the idea of an ending (or an identity), a surplus aspect (or 'plus-value’ to use a term used by Paul Ricoeur about metaphor) which emerges in some collage painting. It’s definitely active as it holds the viewer’s attention in the instance of a performance between parts. All our borrowing, displacement, transposition and deviation emphasises a doing rather than a done.”

‘between parts undone’ extends on the thesis proposed by Didier Eribon in ‘Insult and the Making of the Gay Self’, in which he suggests that queer identities are contingent, not fixed, and that, both collectively and individually, we are continually challenged and liberated to reconsider and re-form our identities in response to ever changing contingencies, internal and external. Who are our ancestors, our heroes and heroines, our fathers and mothers?  How has the history of those who came before us made us that which we are, and what legacy will we leave for those who come after us?  There is no ‘there there’, or resolved state towards we march, except perhaps as a utopian ideal. Rather, our being, the shaping we make of ourselves and the narrative we construct to order our lives and our wider communities, are in a continual state of  flux. This contingent state of fluidity presents us, not with a hindrance, but instead, with the  boundless opportunity for creation and re-creation.

The exhibition creates a dialogue across the works of three painters in which these questions find echoes and different kinds of answers, drawn out of differing experiences. We are artists whose practices evidence a consciousness of our position as situated in the history of identity. In our work, representations of the self and the body are not necessarily ones most  conventionally depicted in mainstream culture, including those predominating in queer cultural imagery. We are interested in new ways of exploring experience that respond to these ideas of contingency, to how we find things now, and to the new, fast-changing and increasingly fluid world we are in. We are interested in imagining new ways of being .

David Lock, Gavin Maughfling, J.A. Nicholls.

Artist bios

J.A. Nicholls. Born in the UK, Nicholls studied painting at Chelsea College of Art and the Royal College, London. Selected exhibitions include the Performativity of Painting at the Stephen Lawrence Gallery, Greenwich, the Ruth Borchard Prize at Piano Nobile, the Royal Academy of Arts Summer Exhibition, Creative London, at Space_K, Gwacheon in Korea and Jerwood Contemporary Painters.

https://www.janicholls.com/

David Lock (b. Leicester) graduated from Goldsmiths, London with an MA in Fine Art following a BA (Hons) in Fine Art from The University of Reading. Recent exhibitions include 'Creekside Open' 2019 Selected by Sacha Craddock, APT Gallery, London, 'Telescope' curated by Nigel Cooke, Jerwood Gallery, Hastings, 'John Moores Painting Prize' 2018, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, 'The Performativity of Painting', the Stephen Lawrence Gallery, Greenwich and a solo show 'Fragmented Eros' at studio1.1, London in 2018

https://www.david-lock.com/

Gavin Maughfling studied at the Ruskin School of Art at the University of Oxford, and subsequently at the University of East London. He has exhibited widely in the UK, Europe and Singapore. Recent exhibitions include the Creekside Open 2019, APT Gallery, selected by Sacha Craddock; Artworks 2019, Barbican Arts Project Space,  selected by Emma Talbot and Alex Schady; ‘Did You See Me Coming?’ no format Gallery; ‘Beyond the Binaries’, the House of St. Barnabas, and ‘Over Time’, University of Greenwich and National Maritime Museum. With Suzanne de Emmony he co-founded DEM projects, curating international exhibitions in London and Singapore.

between parts undone, studio1.1 Gallery, London, February - March 2020