The Herbert Art Gallery & Museum in Coventry presents George Shaw: I woz ere on view through Sun 11 March 2012.
George Shaw, Scenes from the Passion: The Fall, 1999, copyright George Shaw, courtesy Wilkinson Gallery, London
For the past 15 years, recent Turner Prize nominee George Shaw has been making paintings of the Tile Hill housing estate where he grew up.
Using Humbrol enamels, Shaw began making the works in a fit of nostalgia after he had left home and moved away. Over time, the paintings became a kind of ‘I woz ere’ written in retrospect.
For the first time, this collection of paintings is shown in the place they represent. Many viewers will recognise the specific pubs, street corners, rows of garages, trees and shops, but less familiar is the unsettling resonance that Shaw brings to the work. Displayed alongside these landscapes is a new series of watercolours of previously painted places as they exist here and now.
Accompanying the exhibition, Shaw also presents the works of art he made as a child in the early 1970s to the summer before he went to art school in 1985. – www.theherbert.org