New Paintings
26 April – 26 May, 2001

Exhibition

Opening Reception: Thursday April 26, 6-8pm

The Spencer Brownstone Gallery is pleased to announce James Rielly's second solo exhibition at the gallery. This exhibition will feature both new work and pieces from Rielly’s solo museum exhibition recently traveling throughout Wales. Following in the footsteps of Saatchi’s Sensation! show of which James Rielly was also a part, Mr. Rielly’s work evoked shock and concern in Wales sparking television debates and petitions to revoke funding from the various museums that exhibited his work. These paintings explore a classic Riellyian subject matter – childhood. Rielly's paintings act as a mirror to society's perversion since there is nothing explicitly revealed in his paintings rather it is the viewers' own fantasies and fears projected on to the work that makes them shocking and outrageous.

The first impression of James Rielly’s art is that of traditional figurative painting. However, he is quite detached and impartial from the subjects of his work. Rielly derives inspiration from newspaper and tabloid clippings of scandalous stories from everyday life. Without being illustrative, the artist digests the information and paints “bumps, bruises and breaks of modern life.”

Artist Bio

James Rielly was born in Wales in 1956 and holds an MA from Belfast College of Art. He has received fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Centre in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and at the Kunstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin. In 1995, he was a MOMART Fellow at the Tate Gallery in Liverpool, receiving a prize in the John Moores exhibition.

James Rielly had most recently participated in Sensation, at the Royal Academy in London, in the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin and the Brooklyn Museum of Art. This followed his participation in Sorted at IKON Gallery, Birmingham. He has had solo exhibitions at the Oriel Mostyn Gallery in Wales, at the Musee de Beaux Arts in Nantes and at the Centre d’Art Neuchatel, Switzerland. His work is in the collections of Tate Gallery and the Sintra Museu de Arte Moderna, Portugal among others.