Graham Treadwell Artist's Statement

For me, painting functions as a means to prevent and counter depression and addiction. As such, it is an enquiry into the nature of perception, based on an essential, involuntary angst and dissatisfaction.

Living and working in London, I study the transience of life and environment, seeking out that which is still and out-of-time. This investigation starts from a position opposed to current culture; the brutal cult of celebrity and omnipotent hysterical materialism. I am drawn to nature, the erotic and our mortality; violence and power and our constant threat of elimination.

Working in oil paint, I produce canvases that will very probably outlive me. I layer ambiguous and mundane imagery with scandalous obscenities, the tenderly painted surface incorporating the ageing and inevitable degradation of the image. Unstable, "putrefying" lumps of pigment conflate with the representation, in the way repulsion sits beside desire.

My work is about enslavement, transgression and dissent; it is about collective failed utopias, and the death of God in our sleek modern wasteland, populated by faceless  millions living interior lives, bombarded and constantly set upon by infinite visual stimuli, boundless commodification and unrelenting publicity.

Graham Treadwell was born in South Africa in 1983. He moved to Edinburgh in 1996, and studied drawing and painting at the Edinburgh College of Art, before moving to London in 2008, where he now lives and works. Graham is currently represented by the Art and Escape Gallery (http://www.artandescape.com/) and visit the blog to see images of current work (http://grahamtreadwell.blogspot.com/)