Marianne Boesky Gallery is pleased to announce the first solo New York exhibition of Glasgow-based Tony Swain. The artist has been selected to represent Scotland at the 2007 Venice Biennale.
Using collaged newspaper for his canvas, Tony Swain paints on the found material inventing dreamlike landscapes and abstracted patterns. Swain fastens these ‘works on paper’ directly to the gallery walls, underscoring the directness of the newsprint medium. In his determining of what is to remain obscured and what is permitted to be legible in these collaged paintings, Swain places his personal mark on the mass-produced print media. The layers of newspaper text and imagery undulate with Swain’s acrylic strokes fusing the divergent parts. The artist crafts fragmented environments with spatial illusion and skewed perspectives where snippets of the depicted scenes feel strangely familiar. And yet the compositions elude any sort of finite, comprehensive reading, instead remaining indecipherable and disorienting. Swain constructs these intimate, quiet worlds, which though anchored in reality, ultimately eschew it in favor of the sublime.
Tony Swain was born in 1967 in Northern Ireland, and currently lives and works in Glasgow. The artist is represented by The Modern Institute in Glasgow and Herald Street in London.