Neil Raitt:Floating Lands
11.07 – 09.08.2024
Closed
Hours
Monday to Friday
10:00 am – 5:30 pm
Gallery
3–5 Swallow Street
London
W1B 4DE
Huxley-Parlour are delighted to present Floating Lands, an exhibition of new works by British artist Neil Raitt. The exhibition presents large and small scale works that reveal Raitt’s evolving engagement with the landscape genre. Using a spectrum of saturated colours, Raitt’s canvases depict classic iconography of the American landscape as replicating motifs: snow capped peaks, log cabins, cacti and rivers. New, large scale paintings explore idealised jungle scenes in which foliage is brought to the fore.
The exhibition’s title refers to the ambiguity of space which defines Raitt’s works. The artist suspends his imagery against richly coloured grounds, decontextualising it through repetition and juxtaposition, as waterfalls meet desert and cacti take root alongside pine trees. Raitt positions his work dichotomously between the real and the imagined, with recognisable tropes of classical landscape paintings manifest in idealised natural landscapes. Figurative realism gives way to the surreal as each repeated vignette appears subtly altered. Raitt’s landscapes are resultantly uncanny, denying attempts to trace an original as the simulacral impetus overwhelms the picture plane.
The Exhibition
4
B. United Kingdom1986
Biography
Rather than depicting singular or necessarily even real locations, Neil Raitt distils his landscapes into artificial motifs which generate an uncanny sense of place. These motifs are repeated across his canvases, seamlessly tesselating with the potential to extend infinitely. Whilst their repetition appears almost mechanical, each vignette is individually rendered by Raitt in saturated hues that echo the style of popular television-painter Bob Ross. His unique visual language – somewhere between representation and abstraction – offers a reflection upon the possibilities of artistic production in the digital age.
Neil Raitt was born in Leicester in 1986. He studied Fine Art at Norwich University College of the Arts before receiving his MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art, London in 2013. The following year, Raitt received the Catlin Art Prize, followed by the Northern Trust Acquisition Prize in 2016. He has exhibited internationally, including at the Goss-Michael Foundation in Dallas and the Centre d’Art Contemporain La Halle des Bouchers in Vienne. Raitt’s work is in the permanent collections of the DePaul Art Museum, Chicago; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; the Saatchi Collection, London; and the Frank-Suss Collection, London.
Raitt lives and works in London.