Untitled (Triple Portrait), 2003oil on canvas40.5 x 30.5 cm
Portrait (Bandaged Head), 2003tempera on canvas46 x 35 cm
Necropolis, 2003oil on canvas35 x 46 cm
Easel In The Woods, 2003oil on canvas35 x 46 cm
Untitled (Bathers), 2003oil on canvas61 x 51 cm
Portrait (Girl In Profile), 2004oil on canvas30 x 24 cm
Tourism Painting, 2003oil on canvas61 x 51 cm
Untitled (Mother And Child), 2003oil on canvas46 x 61 cm
Dancing Couple, 2003-04tempera on canvas71 x 91 cm
Purple Bob, 2003oil on canvas61 x 51 cm
Portrait (Child), 2004oil on canvas30 x 24 cm
Trees, 2003tempera on canvas35 x 46 cm
Button Mushroom, 2003-04acrylic and tempera on canvas127 x 102 cm
Figure In The Woods, 2003oil on canvas46 x 46 cm
It'S You, 2003oil on canvas46 x 36 cm
Recliner, 2003acrylic on canvas71 x 91 cm
Portrait, 2004oil on canvas30 x 24 cm
Press Release
NEAL TAIT12 February - 27 March 2004We are pleased to announce the first exhibition in Italy of the British artist Neal Tait. Born in Edinburgh in 1965, Tait graduated at the Royal College of Art and lives in London. Since 2000 he is represented by White Cube Gallery in London. In 2002 he took part in the in the exhibition Painting on the Move at Kunsthalle Basel and had solo shows at Galerie Sies+Höke in Düsseldorf and at the Douglas Hyde Gallery in Dublin.Tait is a painter whose subjects are always contingent and this exhibition brings together a series of new works that demonstrate his concerns with painting as an exploratory process, whereby meaning can be suggested through the handling of paint itself. In these paintings large areas of canvas remain blank, creating the feeling of open-ended, expanded works which seem to suggest many different narratives; transparent washes and thin skeins of paint describing simple, informal structures. These works seem to display an extreme version of figuration, which, through their flat, reduced palette, push the limits of representation.Tait often works from various types of source material - an image in a magazine, a sketch from the imagination, or as is most often the case, a photograph from reportage, fashion, advertising, sport or architecture. He often reworks paintings over a length of time, adding and subtracting elements according to the internal dynamic of the painting. In the past, Tait has explored a series of given, irreducible structures such as a group of suburban houses, simplified to their most basic elements - four walls, a window and a roof. In these new paintings, there is a similar distillation at work, where a thought process has been reduced to an ineffable subject, darkly emotional and suggestive of a burgeoning psychological drama.