Overview
We are delighted to present an exhibition by Royal Academician Terry Setch at our Kingsland Road gallery. The exhibition will feature several publicly unseen pieces, which will present a diversion from his usual techniques and themes. Among the majority of Setch's large scale works will be those themed around the coast near Penarth in Wales, where the artist is based. These works act as a witness to his surroundings, in the literal sense via the materials he uses and the layers he creates within them, but also in the wider issues his art works often raise.
Setch is well-known for utilizing varying materials in his analysis and interpretation of the conflict between nature and society. His huge painted canvases are often augmented with materials and debris found on the beach, a combination of both man-made and natural matter. This contrast in itself creates a tension, raising questions on pollution, mankind's apathy, the forces of nature in the weathered objects, inadvertently representative of demise. This juxtaposes the notion that there is new life in the objects used to create such histrionic representations of the world around us. Setch's polygonal subject matter enables the onlooker to fully experience the world created within it via the use of textured materials; such as encaustic wax, melted plastic and polypropylene. However the artist does not utilise realism, as his works require the viewer to suspend disbelief in order to fully experience what each piece evokes for them. The artist's new, more abstract pieces appear to present a fresh vision of the world, a return to innocence and a sense of rebirth, alongside good and bad progression of humankind. There is a subtext of realization where from personal experience, Setch touches on humanity, freedom of convention, open thought and active reaction. The themes are more contemporary, yet recurring, always containing a thread of reinvention, as they throw up age old theories and predicaments, but show how society views and deals with them differently today, some never to be solved and others progressing towards a solution. There is hope in these works, but also an acceptance of what is, and is not, humanly possible.
Born in London in 1936, Terry Setch studied at the Slade School of Fine Art, London. While at college took part in the Young Contemporaries exhibitions in 1957, 1959 and 1960 in the RBA Galleries, London. In June 1964 he became Senior Painting lecturer at Cardiff College of Art. Setch was elected as a Royal Academician in 2009. In 1964 Setch moved to Penarth in Wales. The new surroundings fuelled the evolution of his work. New abstract paintings are fed with beach detritus, creating a fusion between synthetic and natural materials. Daily trips to Penarth beach collecting flotsam and jetsam rejected by the estuary's tide are then combined with more traditional media such as oil paint, coloured wax or naturally sourced kaolin. "I have been using the pollution of the local beach, particularly the plastic detritus, as my major subject since the mid-1970s, long before concern about the damage caused by the ubiquitous, non-biodegradable plastic became widespread in this country."
