Merlin James
SELECTED WORKS 1985 - 2005
December 9, 2005 - January 21, 2006
Opening Reception: Thursday, December 9, 6-8 pm
* Note the gallery is closed December 24 - January 2

Sikkema Jenkins & Co. is pleased to announce its exhibition: Merlin James: Selected Works 1985 - 2005, which will run from December 9th through January 21st 2006.

James's third one-person exhibition at the gallery seeks to demonstrate something of the depth and evolving complexity of his practice over the past twenty years.

Receiving his BA in 1982 in London, James was largely based there until 2004, taking an MA at the Royal College of Art in 1986 and more recently spending extended working visits in New York. He currently lives in Glasgow.

James's is a distinctly individual voice in contemporary art. Resistant to Neo-expressionism, his paintings from the early 80s onwards, in their apparent modesty and ambiguity, anticipated much about the more recent 'revival' of the medium. Many of his motifs initially suggest emotional neutrality (blank building facades, almost bland landscapes); and implied narratives are usually cryptic and de-contextualized (dimly familiar or archetypal figures, echoes from old photographs or obscure works of art). Mood is often melancholic or distracted. Style and idiom are varied and unpredictable. Concerns with genre, convention and artifice have been a constant in the work, as part of an interrogation of the language of painting and the nature of aesthetic experience. Current shibboleths such as 'nostalgia', 'irony' and 'dystopia' have understandably been invoked in past discussion of his work.

'Tellingly, however, in a recent interview, the artist observes, 'What I miss in much painting at the moment is the sense of each individual work being a unique locus of experience...There's still a jaded skepticism about meaning as well as about value...In each of my paintings I try (if this doesn't sound too pious) to find a new truth.' (Blunt Art Text, Chicago 2005)

With time the reserve of James's painting can be recognized as a necessary 'shield', for acute sensitivity - protective of preserved or recuperated faculties of responsibility, compassion, empathy and expressivity. In recent years the emergence in his work of disarmingly explicit sexuality, and of such emotive painterly propositions as the seascape or portrait, confirm a faith (however resolutely materialist and anti-transcendent) in the human capacity for feeling and meaning, and for their expression.

Merlin James was born in Cardiff (Wales) in 1960. James has shown extensively throughout Europe. Most recently with group shows; Edge of the Real at Whitechapel Gallery, London (2004) and Painting Direct at Mannheim Kunsthalle (2004-5).