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Akim Monet Fine Arts, LLC

Dallas

Neal Tait

(British, born 1965)

surgeon by neal tait

Neal Tait

Surgeon, 2009

Price on Request

Biography

Timeline

1965
Born in Edinburgh, Neal Tait studied at Chelsea School of Art and then the Royal College of Art, where he graduated in 1993.
1987 - 1991
Chelsea School of Art , London (BA )
1991 - 1993
Royal College of Art, London (MA)
1993
Henderson & Parkinson Travel Award
2001
Residency British School at Rome
For his exhibition at White Cube in February 2000 he presented a series of paintings of individual heads. Each painting depicted a character that appeared sealed in and self-contained. The most distinctive element in these pictures is that the character’s eyes are always averted, making the people seem unavailable, refusing the gaze of the viewer. As well as this, their features are variously reduced, schematised, bleached out or latent beneath mask-like layers of translucent paint. 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. He often re-works paintings over a length of time, adding and subtracting elements according to the internal dynamic of the painting, which is sometimes bold and at other times obscure. 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. Tait also makes gouaches that present corners of the everyday world, the clutter of a living room, a scout’s hut in a playing field, a birdhouse, an old television set, the overlooked things on the periphery of our vision.
Tait’s pictures demonstrate his concern with painting as an exploratory process, whereby meaning can be suggested through the handling of paint itself. In his recent 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. There is a distillation at work, where a thought process has been reduced to an ineffable subject, darkly emotional and suggestive of a burgeoning psychological drama. Often displaying an extreme version of figuration using a flat and reduced palette, they push the limits of representation.
Tait has exhibited at various venues internationally. Solo exhibitions include White Cube, London (1999 and 2002), Sies + Höke Galerie, Düsseldorf (2002 and 2004), Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin (2002) and Monica da Cardenas, Milan (2004). In 2000 Tait was awarded the British School at Rome Fellowship.
Lives in London

Exhibitions

2011
Works of Paper, ACME., Los Angeles
Among Flesh, Alison Jacques, London
Der Menschen Klee, Kunst Im Tunnel, Dusseldorf
Watercolour, Tate Britain, London
Works of Paper, ACME., Los Angeles, CA
2010
The Milkplus Bar, Josh Lilley Gallery, London
Kupferstichkabinett - Between Thought & Action, White Cube, London
Once, Removed, Apartment Gallery, Athens
What Have I Done? Fine Art Society, London
2009
TURPS BANANA 1, Galleria Marabini, Bologna, Italy
English (US)

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