Ever After

Derrick Guild

We are delighted to offer Derrick Guild's remarkable installation Ever After for The Edinburgh Festival 2019.

Derrick Guild creates a cabinet of curiosities for the post-modern, digital world. His rediscovery, or rather for the painter for whom it has never gone away, his repurposing of drawing and oil paint is in the context of a semiotic investigation of culture, art history and enlightenment. Guild is as comfortable constructing objects and vitrines as drawing, making moving images as permanent marks in paint, and sees no barrier in his varied approach, no essential difference between the conceptual and object-based practice.

In Ever After he has looked at the most traditional of Joshua Reynold’s orders: portraiture and forced us to interrogate how we look and so what we learn. He takes the miniature, the small oval format, and provides a detail, not a face - against all expectations and in an installation of many of these miniature details our mind tries to reconstruct a whole. He has copied portraits by some of history’s most painterly artists: Velásquez, Raeburn and Lely, but as grids of labels, each bearing a detail, or single labels with a partial of the whole: art imitating art concealing art. But he does not deny his own instinct towards beauty and each work has satisfied the need: delicacy, balance and harmony achieved at an exquisite pitch in each work, however disembodied.

Click here to purchase the fully illustrated catalogue.