23 February - 23 March 2011
iArt Gallery, 71 Loop Street
iArt Gallery is pleased to present An Everlasting Once, a major solo exhibition of new paintings by Matthew Hindley, and the first since his iArt Gallery debut with Like, like, like, like a circus in September 2009. For the past year Hindley has been in the studio, developing a body of primarily large scale paintings on Belgian linen. These works are the most ambitious and accomplished of his career to date.
In An Everlasting Once, Hindley continues his ongoing meditation on the studio as testing ground for a potential creative utopia or, on the other hand, the breakdown of such ideals. Subject matter for the paintings is gathered via a series of shoots, for which Hindley directs scenes much like in the theater, creating tableaus of people, animals and props.
The title of the exhibition refers to Hindley’s desire to capture what Cartier-Bresson has described as the ‘defining moment’, a moment frozen in time and ‘a metaphysical tableau capable of expressing the artist’s deepest and most enduring preoccupations’ (Pollack, 2011).
Lloyd Pollack, in his recent essay on the exhibition has suggested that Hindley’s work “is not just a return to figuration [but] something far deeper and more profound, a new concept of painting as a synthesis of photography, cinema, theatre and performance deployed in discontinuous and fragmented narratives.”
Matthew Hindley was born in Cape Town in 1974. He is a graduate of the Michaelis School of Fine Art in Cape Town in 2002. Hindley was awarded the Michaelis Prize in 2002 and the Public Sculpture Commission for the National Gallery in 2005. In 2010, Hindley’s painting I meant to have but modest needs was selected out of 2 700 entries to form part of the Spier Contemporary, South Africa’s largest biennale and contemporary art competition. Solo shows include Allow me to Observe (2003), which was exhibited both locally and internationally, including at Michaelis Gallery in Cape Town, in Johannesburg and Berlin; Speak Naturally and Continuously (2005) at the South African National Gallery; Before My Time (2006) at 34LONG in Cape Town; Private Vernissage (2007) in Berlin; and Like, like, like, like a circus (2009) at iArt Gallery Wembley: A Project Room for Contemporary Art.