Artist: Guy Church
Exhibition title: The Inside Circle
Venue: Tops Gallery, Memphis, US
Date: October 23 – December 5, 2015
Photography: images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Tops Gallery, Memphis
Tops Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of drawings by Guy Church. Originally from Wisconsin this will be Church’s first solo show in Memphis, TN where he has lived for the past 20 years.
Inspired by his love for the history of Western painting, Church began to make drawings in 1986. Church’s drawings almost exclusively depict scenes of young people involved in domestic activities, often in solitude. Lost in play, reading, typing, and drawing, the adolescents represented are self-determining. Adults, when depicted, loom benignly. The pictures portray familiar scenes with fabular import. Church has stated “I like the subject of people and what they do. I pretty much just try to invent a face that looks like the person in the story I have in my mind. I ask myself, ‘What is she thinking about?’ Well that’s kind of up to the viewer, I guess. She’s not a real person. She’s a picture.”
The drawings presented are rendered in graphite, charcoal, colored pencil, ballpoint pen, paint pen, and combinations of these mediums. All of the drawings on view depict domestic genre scenes except for a recently completed work based on Enthroned Madonna and Child, a 13th century Byzantine painting from the National Gallery’s collection. The reverence in which Church imbues his scenes of everyday life is explicit in this final work.
