Contemporary
Art
Chronicle
Ian Parker
A work may start with a specific idea or as a vague reaction; a response to a thought, a feeling, a shape, a piece of information. This might be emotional, political, aesthetic, material or intellectual and mostly all these things together.
And of course all this is filtered into and through the ‘language’ - received, learnt, remembered, questioned, discarded and found again. And always the thing itself as it unfolds through the act of making. An accretion, a kind of ‘muscle memory’, from years of looking and trying to make things.
Ian Parker was born in Wolverhampton UK and lived in England, Guyana and Nigeria as a child. Educated at Wimbledon School of Art, Kingston Polytechnic and the Royal Academy Schools, on graduating he undertook fellowships and residencies at Cardiff Institute of Higher Education and Newcastle Polytechnic. Primarily a painter, his work references the vocabulary inherited from 20th century abstraction within an expanded notion of the nature and practice of painting. He has exhibited regularly since 1977 at venues including the Hayward Gallery; Camden Arts Centre; Guildhall Art Gallery, London; Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff; Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh and Arti et Amicitiae, Amsterdam.
More recent exhibitions include: Brute, ARTHOUSE1, London; Supporting Material, Herbert Read Gallery, Canterbury; Sussex Open, Towner Art Gallery, Eastbourne; Blender, The Cello Factory, London; Wells Art Contemporary, Wells Cathedral, Somerset; Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize 2022, London and touring.
He was elected a member of the London Group in 1998. He held full and part-time academic posts from 1980 until retiring as Head of School, School of Fine Art, UCA in 2015. He currently works part-time for the University of the Arts (UAL) Awarding Body.