Clive Head

Art Brokerage: Clive Head British Artist: b. 1965. Clive Head is a British artist born in Kent in 1965. Head is predominantly concerned with the challenge of being a painter in the modern world. His explorations in the studio, curiosity and critical engagement are marked by a constantly evolving practice. Against an evident playfulness in this experimentation, these shifts in how he should paint are best attributed to the relentless quest for an optimum resolution of all that he has experienced. He first gained prominence in the 1990s for his hyper-real urban landscapes which were laced with the pictorial aesthetics from art history. They were distinctly unlike the cool banality of photorealist painting and evolved from an earlier project that was more overt in its reference to Western Art.Head has never conceived his work as a documentary realism. Even the most exacting paintings from this period do not directly record a scene from real life. They are always fictive, they are always coloured and they are always layered. Nor did Head follow the conventional methods of photorealist painting or capitulate to the machine-made image. Ironically perhaps, it was precisely for this difference that he was championed by Louis Meisel, the founder of the Photorealist Movement, who regarded him as the most important realist painter to come out of Europe in the 1990s. His work from this period has been exhibited at numerous museum exhibitions dedicated to Photorealist Art. Listings wanted.