A catalogue to accompany Derrick Guild’s festival exhibition Ever After.
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.
About Derrick Guild
Born in 1963 in Perth, Scotland, Derrick Guild has been the recipient of many awards for his unique work. Guild’s paintings and objects reference European still life of the 15th to 19th centuries. The drama, allegory and naturalism inherent in this period of painting speak to Guild of ever-present dilemmas of the human condition. His works are classical, formal and at the same time contemporary in their sense of dislocation and ambiguity.
