Mixed media on aluminium
Purchased with assistance from The Art Fund,
The ACE/V&A Purchase Grant Fund, Friends of Tullie House, Arts Council England North West and Northern Rock Foundation.
Keith Tyson was born in Ulverston and is a major British contemporary artist and the foremost living artist to have emerged from Cumbria. In 2002 he won the prestigious Turner Prize. Tyson is a conceptual artist but creates works we can all relate to.
This painting is part of a major series of visually beautiful Nature Paintings produced by Tyson since 2006.
In this painting Tyson explores how making art can communicate the complex nature of the world. This painting has associations with cosmology, atomic physics, meteorology and topography but defies any single interpretation. The painting makes visual allusions to the natural world – including geological strata and cosmology – achieved by chance rather than skill. Previously artists were valued for their skilled representation of the physical world. But here Tyson has replaced skill with chance. The forms and colours are determined not by the artist’s hand, but by reactions between specially mixed paints and chemicals poured at different angles and temperatures onto an aluminium plate. Tyson attributes his love of the natural world to his Cumbrian upbringing.
