Reviews
Review of "Naked" exhibition, Atticsalt Gallery, Edinburgh
25/07/2007
Review by Susan Mansfield published in The Scotsman, July 2007
Bodies rendered new by a change in perspective
If the idealised form represents one strand in artists' depictions of the naked body, it has its polar opposite. For every Ingres Odalisque, there is a plump Degas washer woman, wiping the sweat from her brow with the back of her hand. Alan McGowan paints the latter kind of bodies, bodies which confront us with our own flawed selves, bodies which change, which age, which die.
Yet he paints them with such relish that the work is a celebration. The irregularities of the body are explored vigorously in paint, the colours of skin visualised in ambers, purples and greys.
Although we are more distanced from these sitters than from Wildman's muse - we rarely see their faces or sense their emotions - McGowan makes them seethe with physical presence. McGowan works in a range of media, achieving a variety of effects, from a great delicacy in his pastel drawings to a painterly violence in his highly textured oils.
But the basis of his practice is in many hours of life drawing, so whether the body in question is assaulted with paint, or quietly coaxed into life like his beautiful reclining woman, that assured sense of form never leaves us.
by Susan Mansfield
The Scotsman 2007
If the idealised form represents one strand in artists' depictions of the naked body, it has its polar opposite. For every Ingres Odalisque, there is a plump Degas washer woman, wiping the sweat from her brow with the back of her hand. Alan McGowan paints the latter kind of bodies, bodies which confront us with our own flawed selves, bodies which change, which age, which die.
Yet he paints them with such relish that the work is a celebration. The irregularities of the body are explored vigorously in paint, the colours of skin visualised in ambers, purples and greys.
Although we are more distanced from these sitters than from Wildman's muse - we rarely see their faces or sense their emotions - McGowan makes them seethe with physical presence. McGowan works in a range of media, achieving a variety of effects, from a great delicacy in his pastel drawings to a painterly violence in his highly textured oils.
But the basis of his practice is in many hours of life drawing, so whether the body in question is assaulted with paint, or quietly coaxed into life like his beautiful reclining woman, that assured sense of form never leaves us.
by Susan Mansfield
The Scotsman 2007