Michael Stubbs (Exhibition)

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This exhibition takes place in the Cornerstone Gallery, Cornerstone Building, Liverpool Hope University Creative Campus, 17 Shaw Street, Liverpool L6 1HP from Thursday 8th Feb 2024 to Friday 22nd March 2024.

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Michael Stubbs has been a prominent and influential painter for over thirty years and currently teaches at the Glasgow School of Art where he is a Reader in Contemporary Painting. His varied work has touched on painting endgames, mutations of the grid, decorative excess, and the interweaving of process and abstraction. Since the early 2000s he has consistently used processes of visual layering as an open-ended, improvisatory painting style that shows fragmentations of signage and text. 

Stubbs’s paintings are constructed by combining poured, abstract configurations of transparent varnishes and opaque household paints with ready-made graphic stencils.  The repeated pouring, in conjunction with the signs, form a physical process of flat-on-flat layering that reveals multiple perspectives and optical depths. In this way the paintings work through a series of impulses, riffs, accidents, false-starts and changes of mind, to arrive at a moment of dynamic complexity that can’t be planned.  Stubbs has recently incorporated digital images of studio materials and tools to refer the viewer to the act of making a painting in the age of internet overload.

Michael Stubbs studied at Goldsmiths College (PhD 2003; MA 1990) and Bath Academy of Art (BA 1987). He has exhibited internationally since 1990 and solo shows include: Palfrey Space, London, 2021; Reid Corridor Gallery, Glasgow School of Art, 2020; Cornerstone Gallery, Liverpool Hope University, 2017; Hollenbach Gallery, Stuttgart, 2015 and 2006; Laurent Delaye Gallery, London, 2011 and 2010. Group shows include: Sharing a View: Contemporary Art from Glasgow, Luxun Academy of Fine Arts, Shenyang; Tsinghua University, Beijing; Guangzhou Academy of Fine Art, Guangzhou, 2020; The Colour Suggestion: Between Abstraction and Figuration, Oscar Cruz Gallery, Sao Paulo, 2017; When Elephants Come Marching In, De Appel, Amsterdam, 2014; Fast Forward: Contemporary British Art in Brazil, Sao Paulo Biennale, 2010.