Gavin Maughfling
Starting from an encounter with Francis Bacons’ s ‘Two Figures in the Grass’, Maughfling’s recent works ask if a painting’s viewer can be pulled through the canvas surface, so that they are simultaneously one or more of the protagonists in the scene and are at the same time an observer, looking on from outside the picture frame. This duality mirrors the way in which we can experience our own lived reality, being situated both inside our interactions while at the same time being able to look at ourselves from the outside, questioning how the scene would seem to us, or to a real or imagined other. The paintings hover on the boundary of this apparent pictorial paradox, and the process of their making is the search for a solution for this apparently insoluble pictorial problem.
The arenas in which the paintings take place range from the bedroom and the act of making love, to a lip synch from Ru Paul’s Drag Race France, and on to a family outing to Singapore Zoo or the act of caring for a frail parent. Through touch, physical gesture, colour and paint’s materiality, the works explore ideas of intimacy and the performative fantasies and power dynamics that are revealed in our love making; a sudden and unexpected moment of empathy and queer solidarity expressed between two players on a competition stage; and feelings of familial ease, affection, care and togetherness, seen through the retrospective, sometimes yearning lens of loss.
Biography
Lives and works in London. Has exhibited shown widely in the UK and internationally. Recent projects include his solo show ‘Looking at Tigers’, Bermondsey Project Space 2024, ‘X – Contemporary British Painting’ , Newcastle Contemporary Art 2023, Beep Biennial Painting Prize, Elysium Gallery 2020 and 2022, ‘Figure and Ground’, Bermondsey Project Space 2022, ‘Between Parts Undone’, studio 1.1 2020, the Creekside Open, APT Gallery 2019, ‘Artworks’, Barbican Trust 2019, ‘Beyond the Binaries’, The House of St. Barnabas 2018 as well as solo exhibitions at no format Gallery in 2021 and 2019.
Commissioned in 2024 to create sets for a new work by Stephen Pelton Dance, premiering in Kingston New York, travelling to London in 2025. With Suzanne de Emmony he has co-curated exhibitions in London and Singapore and has made and exhibited films including in collaboration with Min-Wei Ting. His work is held in public and private collections including the National Government Art Collection.
