Exhibition Opening: Saturday 11 May 2024, 2-5pm
Free | All Welcome

The Canopy is Sean Steadman’s first solo exhibition in a UK public institution. First and foremost a painter, Steadman is invested in the medium’s specificities and its ability to draw out emergent visual forms. At Devonshire Collective, Steadman presents newly commissioned and recent works that connect processes of painting and printmaking.

The Canopy is an allusion to the trophic layer of treetops, and it forms a continuum with Steadman's earlier 2019 exhibition, The Burrow – both architectural forms self-generated by biology. This titling alludes to Steadman's perspective that painting and its lineages are artifacts of an expanded and inclusive conception of nature. A nature that is not antagonistic to culture, but rather views the structure or dynamics of technology, mathematics, or language as being as "natural" as biology or physics.

Steadman makes works that slow us down, taking their time to unravel and unfold - in opposition to the speed with which we ‘read’ digital and photographic imagery in contemporary culture. His dense and maximal visual forms remain in flux, and without resolution, speaking to the complexity of perceiving the world around us. Formally, this is underpinned by an initial intuitive and immediate process of drawing. He then carefully and deliberately works the entirety of the canvas surface: applying, erasing, layering and reworking. Steadman’s dynamic processes of painting, drawing and printmaking interrelate and never settle, as if continually making and remaking themselves before our eyes.  

Sean Steadman (b.1989, Chelmsford, Essex, UK) previously studied at Slade School of Art and the Royal Academy and is represented by Project Native Informant. Recent exhibitions include Project Native Informant at Art Basel Hong Kong, Hong Kong and Dispatches, Sans Titre, Paris.

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