Marianne Boesky Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new works by Neil Campbell. This is the artist’s first solo show at the gallery.
Painting directly on to the wall, Neil Campbell transforms the gallery’s interior with his geometric shapes and patterning. The artist intervenes in the architecture, toying with the experience of the space and addressing questions of viewer perception. Letting intuition guide the process, the artist divines ‘sweet spots’ within the exhibition space, scaling his shapes and situating them in the locales he deems most harmonic. A massive inverted triangle dominates the main gallery, while fields of small circles pulsate in the front gallery. Despite the flatness of the painted form, the scale of the triangle coupled with its impenetrable blackness produces an overwhelming, almost vertiginous effect. The matte planes seem only to highlight and heighten the vibration felt from the looming shape. Campbell’s varying circles oscillate between evoking a sensation of drawing energy away from the viewer and projecting a kinetic force outward. The negative space between the dots in turn retains its own knot of energy. Inspired initially by how various cultures privileged a specific center along the vertical axis of the human figure, the artist explains that his work addresses “the electric field of the body.”
Neil Campbell lives and works in Vancouver. He studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, The Vancouver School of Art and Concordia University in Montreal where he received a MFA in 1979. Campbell had a solo show at Gallery Franco Noero in Turin in 2007. His work has been included in the group shows Crop Rotation at Marianne Boesky Gallery in 2008; Supernatural at The Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver, 2004 and weak thought at the Vancouver Art Gallery in 2000. In 2006, Campbell curated PAINT at the Vancouver Art Gallery, a survey of painting in British Columbia since the 1960’s.