The painting reproduced below was actually bought by the Tate, which must have given particular pleasure to Anthony Wilkinson and George Shaw both.
Why so large? So as to fill the walls of as much of Tate Britain as possible! Five colour pages in the catalogue as well. Five pictures on this occasion, all of them big - the 91x121cm paintings rather than the 43x53cm ones which had dominated Shaw’s first show at the Anthony Wilkinson Gallery. This time Shaw’s paintings were seen alongside the work of Nathan Coley (again), Paul Noble (again), but also the likes of Rachel Whiteread, Jim Lambie, Cornelia Parker and Susan Philipsz. Watkins and Judith Nesbitt were the selectors for ‘Days Like These’, the Tate Triennial Exhibition of Contemporary British Art in 2003.
#Shaw tinge tile full#
But, given what happened next, obviously they lodged in full - albeit sombre and subdued - Humbrol colour in Jonathan Watkins’s mind. Only two Shaw paintings were exhibited, and they’re reproduced in the catalogue in black and white. Shaw’s work was seen alongside such influential contemporary artists as Nathan Coley, Paul Noble, Tracy Mackenna and Edwin Janssen, Fischlli and Weiss and Richard Wentworth. (Sit on the raised grass bed? The viewer says no.) So why not just stand there in the drizzle, making the most of what’s yours, what no-one can take away from you? Sight and breath and life. Nowhere the viewer/resident can go in order to find refuge. Damp sky above, wet concrete slabs below. I can well see why he chose this painting by Shaw. Scenes from the Passion: The Library and the Back of the Triple Triangle Club, 2002: Humbrol enamel on board. In 2000, Jonathan Watkins, director of the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham, oversaw the group exhibition ‘As It Is’, which was concerned with the ‘soft city’, the ‘fluid and impressionistic space between architectural exteriors’. If it was Anthony Wilkinson that got George Shaw’s career off and running (and it was), then it was another gallerist who helped raise it to the next level.
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