National Gallery presents exhibition “George Shaw：My Back to Nature”

George Shaw：My Back to Nature. (Photo/people.cn)

LONDON Mar. 30 —— George Shaw has been the National Gallery’s Rootstein Hopkins Associate Artist for the past two-and-a-half years. The Rootstein Hopkins Foundation Associate Artist Scheme enables leading contemporary artists to work with a collection of paintings that were made before 1900. The artist is given a studio in which to make new work that in some way connects to the National Gallery Collection. It is designed to demonstrate the continuing inspiration of the Old Master tradition on today's artists.

Since 2014, Shaw has been based in a studio located in the heart of the National Gallery. From here, he’s had swift and unrestricted access to the Gallery to explore the collection out of hours at his leisure, draw from the pictures, observe the public, and find inspiration in great art for his own work… The result is George Shaw: My Back to Nature.

During his teenage years, Shaw would often explore an area of neglected woodland around his home, strewn with abandoned rubbish. Walking through that woodland he remembers feeling “something out of the ordinary could happen at any time there, away from the supervision of adults.

More than 50 new paintings and drawings – predominantly woodland landscapes – are included in George Shaw: My Back to Nature, and feature his investigation of the clash of cultures; classical stories linked with the traces of similar, timeless behaviour in the modern world, also the portrayal of religion.

George said: “I think the best person for the job would have been me at 15 or 16. He would have been in the gallery 18 hours a day for two years. I accepted it on his behalf and did the best job I could. As it turns out the longer I spend here the earthier and more profane the collection gets. Even the religious paintings eventually get down from their high horse and meet you on your level. It’s all sex, death, bowls of fruit and flowers and the odd landscape. That may sound somewhat dismissive, but it’s kept artists busy for seven hundred years and continues to do so. As such I flip from feeling moderately confident to feeling utterly insignificant on a daily basis, every time I walk through the gallery. I have dragged these big themes through my own little history. In the woods I played in as a child I found Calvary, nymphs in the forest, the gods of drinking and naughtiness, rituals of transformation and transgression and the futile attempts to leave something behind that said I was here.”

National Gallery Special Projects Curator Colin Wiggins said: “When the National Gallery invited Shaw to undertake this project, he was known for his representations of the crumbling urban landscape, with his subjects drawn from around the Midlands council estate that was his childhood home. After his time at the National Gallery however, this has all gone. Trees and forests replace tower blocks and lock-up garages but still showing those signs of human activity in the often rather nasty detritus we leave behind us.”