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A Cornish Painter in Nice
2010-05-19 23:41
What: Place and Material
Where: Musée d'Art Moderne et d'Art Contemporain Promenade des Arts
When: 29 May to 26 September 2010
Admission: free
British artist David Tremlett is exhibiting his work at the Musée d’Art Moderne et d’Art Contemporain (MAMAC) in Nice from 29 May to 26 September; the opening takes place on 28 May at 6.30 in the presence of Muriel Marland-Militello, who has special responsibility for cultural affairs in Nice.
Tremlett was born in 1945 in Saint-Austell in Cornwall, and lives and works in Bovington, Hertfordshire. At 19, unhappy with the life of study at the Royal College of Art, he travelled to India, searching out the sounds, images and experiences which ultimately he transcribed onto paper, paintings and murals.
Tremlett takes on the role of a nomadic artist, a walker, led by instinct to reach out to other cultures. His work is deeply structured both by his journeys, observations and encounters, and an expatriate’s sense of being both in and outside that culture.
His use of materials such as chalk, pastel or earth, reinforces the close physical contact between artist and landscape. Notebook and pen in hand, David Tremlett travels the world and records the events of nature, landscape, architectural forms, the track of creative man, while at the same time expressing the quality of impermanence and transience: as he puts it, his work is about 'the fugitive, the intangible, almost nothing'.
Back in the studio, sights sounds, events and colours become works on paper, sometimes very large ones: the new series of nineteen pastels done over the course of the last two years. is based around abstract compositions in which coloured areas are juxtaposed with lines carefully determined by the geometric principles he cherishes.
This is not the first time that Tremlett has exhibited at MAMAC. Past shows have included a monumental mural, part of the ‘Intramuros’ exhibition, and his vividly coloured 2004 staircase ‘Drawing for S’.