Oliver Clegg in his studio in Hackney
Last year Oliver Clegg submitted work for the Royal Academy's annual Summer Exhibition and not only were two of his paintings accepted but they were hung alongside work by two YBA heavyweights, Sarah Lucas and Gary Hume. Since then Clegg, aged 27, has gathered a discerning and loyal following among collectors and curators. His work has been acquired by two of the UK's most visible collectors, Frank Cohen and Anita Zabludowicz, and he's much in demand for exhibitions - most recently a group show, with Alastair Mackie and Polly Morgan, which opens tonight at The Gallery @ Adventure Ecology. He's also taking part in Flora Fairbairn's Salon 2007 which opens on Thursday 7 March.
After graduating from Bristol University with a degree in Italian, Oliver Clegg decided to go to Florence where he studied art and specifically drawing. It was while in Italy that he decided to devote himself to making art fulltime. When he got back to London he enrolled on an MA course at City and Guilds of London Art School, and began to develop his distinctive style which is characterised by skilled draughtsmanship and presenting traditional techniques, such as drawing, painting and etchings, in new ways.
For his paintings Oliver Clegg uses old drawing boards from art schools which are covered in other people's marks. What Clegg likes about these alternative canvases is that they come with history - doodles, scribbled down names and telephone numbers, the co-ordinates of a rendezvous - which relates to someone else's life. Clegg turns these found objects into backgrounds for his own paintings, finding another use for something that was important to someone else, and inviting the viewer's imagination to roam freely between the possible narratives encapsulated on the drawing boards and in the objects Clegg paints on top of them.
Recycling found objects that have had another use in another time carries through to the objects Clegg chooses to paint. Discarded toy building bricks you might have played with as a child, an upturned pram perhaps grown out of, and a silenced gramophone, a symbol of adolescent decadence, appear in the paintings not simply as signifiers of some kind of private nostalgia, but as objects relating to the universal experience of growing up. As well as being infused with a sense of melancholy, the objects in Clegg's paintings also take on a noble quality, something which the artist says comes from looking at De Chirico's paintings. Clegg's works teeter back and forth between the two and three dimensional - prams and old-fashioned gramophones are plunged into dark shadow, accentuating their three-dimensional quality, which at the same time jars with the two-dimensional surfaces on to which they are painted.
The artists Clegg is most drawn to are those celebrated for their craftsmanship such as Leonardo, Sargent and Velasquez, but he is also steeped in surrealism and particularly the collages of Max Ernst which create a harmonious, single image out of disjointed parts. Similarly, Clegg's paintings bring together unlikely elements which he fuses into one aesthetically rich whole. The same approach applies to the etchings that Clegg makes. He uses other people's old diaries or pages from secondhand books as backgrounds onto which dolls, teddy bears and other childhood toys appear locked in another time.
Unafraid to work in different mediums, Clegg's next project for a solo show in London this May will involve a series of wood carvings with Russian dolls perched on top of carved doors you wouldn't think out of place in a church. After that, he hopes to make a film with Robert Del Naja (aka 3D) of Massive Attack, bringing together sound and images - and giving voice to the gramophones in his paintings which in that medium are caught in spell-binding silence.
Rebecca Wilson
Rebecca Wilson is the editor of Your Gallery magazine, and was formerly editor of ArtReview and deputy editor of Modern Painters.
Oliver Clegg, Alastair Mackie and Polly Morgan
Waste & The Lost World: Memento Mori
8 March - 13 April 2007
The Gallery @ Adventure Ecology HQ
125 Charing Cross Road
London WC2H OEW
T: +44 (0)207 758 4717
www.adventureecology.com
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