Saatchi Magazine Interview: Phoebe Unwin

(Originally published in Saatchi Online Magazine)

Phoebe Unwin is an artist who revels in the use of paint, in all its tones, textures and applications. Her paintings take as their subjects the everyday familiar (bananas, a key, a man holding flowers) which she chooses to depict from recollection and imagination rather than observation from life or photographs. Then what happens when she hits the canvas is the conjuring of a world of expressive colour and mark marking, a remembered reality swathed in magical colour combinations, shapes, patterns and textures that render the world we know afresh. Such is the appeal of her work that Unwin has recently featured in both the Saatchi Gallery’s Newspeak and the Hayward Gallery’s British Art Show as well as staging a solo exhibition at Wilkinson Gallery. In July Unwin hosts a talk at Core Gallery in Deptford, but in the meantime she took some time out to talk about her practice and the process behind her continually evolving, highly regarded body of work.

You have some sketchbooks here, how do you use them?

PU: They’re somewhere where I start to work out particular combinations of form, colour, mark. Some of the images are completely abstract, although they never are completely abstract in my paintings. Then some of them are much more recognizable images. They all live together here. There might be an element of say a page of an idea that I then develop into a painting, and that might be a week later or two years later. The basis of the work is a combined approach in a way, it’s very intuitive at the beginning and then the formal qualities, especially in the process of making the painting become very important. 

It’s a reference tool, storage for your ideas.

PU: Yes, it’s very much a reference tool in that it’s somewhere to refer to that feels really close to first instinct. But it’s a longer process until it becomes a painting, there are other things that come into play, because the paintings for instance are all different scales, whereas these books are always the same size.

Another thing about working in the books is that I use a lot of different papers and a lot of different materials and those elements also get translated into the paintings in the sense that I use many different types of materials, I’m not working just with oil or acrylic, there’s a whole range. One of the main reasons for this is really the qualities of colour, because I feel that a colour in a particular paint will be different in another paint, the difference between a spray-paint mark and the colour and maybe the opaqueness of that colour in spray-paint is different to oil paint.

New writing for FAD: Nathan Cash Davidson at Hannah Barry Gallery

I'm now Moving Image Editor at FAD - www.fadwebsite.com - and here's my first review...



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Over the course of her career as a visual artist, Barbara Kruger has enacted something akin to this in her work, drawing on the crisp imagery and pithy language from her days on magazine editorial to pitch consumerism, sexism and other unsavoury cultural mores right back at the viewer. ut intriguingly, rather than provoking the wrath that childish repeating games guarantee, Kruger has managed to maintain her place as part of the mainstream that she skewers. Her striking monochrome images, dashed with red and bearing deadpan slogans like ‘I shop therefore I am’ and ‘Buy me I’ll change your life’ are so slick she even sold them to Selfridges as advertising... (read more)


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