George Shaw

I made a special trip to Newcastle in March to see these paintings. I knew they were about lost spaces of suburbia, the unacknowledged environments which form the background to so many lives. I was not disappointed. I very much enjoyed this large exhibition of richly coloured paintings, full of intensity and atmosphere.

Shaw paints the estate in Coventry where he grew up. He left to study art, then gave it up for some years before returning to study at Royal College in London, and since then he has been photographing the Tile Hill estate and making photo-realist paintings using Humbrol paint intended for model making.

George Shaw Ash Wednesday






The paintings are a reworking of his teenage years, a time when feelings are intense and where the most ordinary places accumulate strong meanings.

Shaw explores the suburban street, the bus stop, the garage doors, the school playground, the path in the woodland, the banal landscape. Estates such as Tile Hill were planned with a benign agenda and assumptions about how people wish to live. Shaw subverts these assumptions by hinting at the ways in which the inhabitants actually use such places in unanticipated ways and at how these places become haunted by intense emotion.

In comparison, the city is highly charged and we are carried along by its energy, which disperses memory and is less stagnant than the suburbs. A rural area is accepting of the land and the rhythms of creation and destruction. There is a kind of deathliness and sterility about the suburbs which makes these paintings and the emotions they evoke so poignant.

George Shaw has recently (5th May, 2011) been nominated as a contestant in this year's Turner Prize.