Jeremy Diggle: Out of Time

An exhibition of Jeremy Diggle’s exuberant, highly coloured abstract paintings.

A series of interrelated pictorial narratives completed over the last 3 years, the work combines a conceptual idea about the activity of painting as a form of abstract mapmaking with the artist’s internal narrative of lived experience, expressed through marks and colour. Each individual painting has been developed over an extended period of time, sometimes taking 4 or 5 years to complete.

Jeremy Diggle’s practice involves working across multiple pictures at the same time, allowing composition and colour to migrate from one canvas to another. This approach to picture making has been compared to that of composing music. If you think of each painting in this exhibition as a tune or track, then in this case the entire exhibition comprises a concept album.

Jeremy’s paintings are literally wrestled ‘out of time’. This concept is embodied through action, personal reflection, formal consideration, and maturation. The work is built with multiple marks and colour decisions, often separated by days, weeks or even months. The pictures are then left at various stages of completion for a year or more before being revisited and continued to a point of resolution.

Jeremy questions the relationship he has established between his own practice and contemporary art. He is very aware that his own art making may well be slowly drifting into the past, out of fashion, irrelevant and out of time. He asks the question “Is this language of painting still contemporary and relevant?”

Jeremy is now in his 71st year this work makes reference to many artistic influences and individuals that have informed his practice since starting art school in 1973 and subsequently spending an entire adult working life balancing his art making between studio and teaching in art schools. It is unavoidable that the artist is conscious of the passing time, that he is making art with an increasing sense of urgency, aware of his own mortality, quite literally running out of time.

10am-4pm, Tue-Sat
Free (voluntary donation to BAC)

Jeremy Diggle

Jeremy grew up in the north east of England. He was an undergraduate at St Martins School of Art and a postgraduate at the Royal College of Art. When he left the RCA he worked as a lecturer at a number of art schools throughout Europe, Scandinavia and the USA. Eventually he relocated to work in New Zealand and Australia before returning to the UK in 2014. Jeremy Diggle has exhibited widely throughout his career includinggroup exhibitions at the ICA, Tate Liverpool, The Arnolfini and Bloomberg, with work in both private and national collections here in the UK and abroad, including the V&A.