Michael Stubbs: Hard-nosed, Soft Hands

Tue - Sat

16th January 2027 - 20th February 2027
10am - 4pm
Exhibitions
Forthcoming Exhibitions

Hard-nosed, Soft Hands focuses on two distinct techniques in Stubbs’s painting practice. At first glance, these techniques appear opposite in style, look and feel. However, this double combination reveals how Stubbs’s unique forms of superimposed, visual perspectives are worked across differing, utilitarian, flat-on-flat mediums. One is hard-edged, overlaid and colourful, the other, his latest work, optically dense, sprayed and softly muted. The earlier work combines poured, abstract configurations of transparent varnishes and opaque household paints, with ready-made graphic stencils and digital images onto MDF boards. The new, stretcher-based works are made with car spray paints stencilled onto decorators’ dust sheets that were placed beneath his previous paintings to collect the debris of their making.

Because we live in a world where screens mediate the physical, Stubbs’s response is to paint using a variety of everyday, utilitarian materials to mirror the disembodied, flat world of screen ubiquity. The resulting impulses, riffs, accidents, false starts, and changes of mind converge into a destabilizing opticality while references to painting’s history collide with digitized image overload in a dizzying spectacle.

Opening: Saturday 16 January 12pm-2pm.

Artist Talk: Saturday 30 January 2.00pm-3.00pm

More Information

Michael Stubbs studied at Goldsmiths College (PhD 2003 and MA 1990) and Bath Academy of Art (BA 1987). He has exhibited internationally since 1990 and solo shows include: Cornerstone Gallery, Liverpool Hope University, 2024 and 2017; Palfrey Space, London, 2021; Reid Corridor Gallery, Glasgow School of Art, 2020; Hollenbach Gallery, Stuttgart, 2015 and 2006; Laurent Delaye Gallery, London, 2011 and 2010. Group shows include: Spotlight 4: Modern and Contemporary Art from the Collection of Chippenham Museum and Art Galleries, 2024; Sharing a View: Contemporary Art from Glasgow, Luxun Academy of Fine Arts, Shenyang; Tsinghua University, Beijing; Guangzhou Academy of Fine Art, Guangzhou, 2020; The Colour Suggestion: Between Abstraction and Figuration, Oscar Cruz Gallery, Sao Paulo, 2017; When Elephants Come Marching In, De Appel, Amsterdam, 2014; Fast Forward: Contemporary British Art in Brazil, Sao Paulo Biennale, 2010.

Stubbs currently teaches at the Glasgow School of Art where he is a Reader (Associate Professor) in Contemporary Painting. Works in public collections include the Government Art Collection, the British Council, Chippenham Museum and Art Galleries, De van den Broek Foundation/Lisse Art Museum, Brown Collection, London, Groucho Club, London, and numerous private collections throughout Europe, United States and South America.