Geraint Evans
My solo exhibitions include Arcadecardiff, Wales 2015; Newport Museum and Art Gallery 2012; Wilkinson Gallery, London 2000 and 2004; Chapter, Cardiff 2001; Glynn Vivian, Swansea 2002 and CASA, Salamanca, Spain 2003.
Group exhibitions include Highlanes Gallery, Drogheda, Ireland 2022 & 2008; The National Museum, Gdansk 2019; Danielle Arnaud Gallery, London 2017; Monash University, Melbourne 2013; Ceri Hand, Liverpool 2011; Shanghai Art Gallery, China 2010; Seongnam Art Centre, Korea 2010; ICA, University of Pennsylvania 2007; The City Gallery, Prague 2004 and The Approach, London 2003 & 1999.
In 2023 I co-curated Arcadia for All? Rethinking Landscape Painting Now with Judith Tucker for the Stanley and Audrey Burton Gallery, Leeds and the Attenborough Arts Centre, Leicester. I have been a resident artist at the Banff Centre for the Arts, Canada and in 2003 I received a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award and the Berwick Gymnasium Fellowship. I was awarded a prize at the John Moores Contemporary Painting Exhibition in 2008.
My work is held in the collections of the Derek Williams Trust, National Museum of Wales; Fondazione Morra Greco, Napoli; The British Embassy, Berlin; The West Collection, Pennsylvania; the Colas Foundation, France. I am the pathway leader for the MA Fine Art Painting course at Camberwell College of Arts, University of the Arts London.
I am interested in the ways in which we perceive, encounter and experience the natural world and read it as landscape. My figurative paintings and drawings explore the notion that landscape is largely a social and cultural construct, responding to the writer W J T Mitchell’s observation that: ‘Landscape is a natural scene mediated by culture’ (Mitchell 2002: 5).
We encounter the natural world in gardens and parks, in shopping malls and suburban green belts, in national parks and theme parks, as gardeners, ramblers and tourists. We see nature framed by a train window or a camera view finder. We seek out scenic views and ‘wild’ places for contemplation, adventure, solitude or as a healthy tonic. I am interested in both the hybridized space in which the built and natural environments meet and in our complex perception of the wilderness.
Often, the Yetis and ornamental hermits that populate my work embody a sense of nature as a wild place, whilst model makers seek to create idealised representations, viewing the natural world through an anthropocentric lens, whilst remaining once removed from its wild entanglements.
