Paul Winstanley

Paul Winstanley is a renowned British artist. His art delves into themes of observation and memory, exploring the intricacies of creating and perceiving paintings and examining the collective post-modern experience of utopian modernist architecture and social spaces.

Biography of Paul Winstanley

Paul Winstanley was born in 1954 in Manchester, UK. He studied at Lanchester Polytechnic in Coventry (1972-1973) before attending Cardiff College of Art, where he earned a BA (Hons) in 1976. From 1976 to 1978, Winstanley continued his studies at the Slade School of Fine Art, where he obtained a Higher Degree in Fine Art.

Winstanley's art has been exhibited in various prestigious institutions, including the Tate, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MoCA LA), Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA), Royal Academy of Arts (London), Esbjerg Kunstmuseum (Denmark), Walker Art Center, and Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego.

His recent solo shows include "Faith After Saenredam and Other Paintings" at Kerlin Gallery in Dublin, Ireland (2017); "Altered States" at Vera Munro Gallery in Hamburg, Germany (2019), and "After the War the Renaissance" at 1301PE in Los Angeles, USA (2020).

Paul Winstanley has also participated in various group exhibitions, including "Melancholy" at the Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art in Sunderland (2001); "Sea Fever: From Turner to Today" at Southampton City Art Gallery (2010); "Lifelike" at The Blanton Museum of Art in Austin (2013); "Conversations" at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin (2015); "Dialogues" at Vera Munro Gallery in Hamburg, Germany (2018), among others.

His creations are part of the permanent collections at the Fondation Daniel and Florence Guerlain, Paris; the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; the Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA), Los Angeles; Musee d'art Contemporain, Sintra, Portugal; New York Public Library; Colby Museum of Art, Maine, USA, among others.

Currently, Paul Winstanley lives and works in London, UK.

Paul Winstanley's Art Style

Winstanley's earlier paintings and creations on paper were centered around abstract structural principles and drew inspiration from American minimalist painters like Brice Marden and Robert Ryman. Subsequently, he underwent a significant shift towards realism influenced by photographic imagery. From the late 1980s onwards, Winstanley's artistic focus has predominantly revolved around large, realistically rendered oil paintings that blend modernist aesthetics and postmodern exploration with the traditional genres of interiors and landscapes. His work adeptly balances interests in the processes of observation and depiction, the viewer's role, and the psychological aspects of everyday, post-war communal spaces. Critics have characterized his style as an "indistinct naturalism."

Utilizing ostensibly conventional genres like Landscape, Interior, Still Life, and Figure, he crafts artworks of conceptual depth that position the viewer's relationship to the painting at the core of the content. Simultaneously methodical and imbued with melancholy, his painterly portrayals of landscapes, pathways, veiled windows, TV lounges, art school studios, and individuals lost in contemplation are executed with exacting and subtle palettes.

Despite his initial training as an abstract and minimalist painter, he defied the typical trajectory of early 20th-century artists by steering back toward a renewed, more introspective representational style. Winstanley's paintings, however, retain much of the aesthetic qualities of earlier abstraction in their pictorial organization and minimalist feel.

Drawing inspiration from historical Northern European artists like Caspar David Friedrich, Vermeer, and Vilhelm Hammershoi, as well as contemporary conceptual practitioners like Richard Hamilton, Winstanley's images embody a sense of imposed order and an atmosphere of abandonment or anticipation, conveying the relentless passage of time.