AFTER 17 years, York contemporary gallery According To McGee is to close its Tower Street doors in September.
Acomb husband and wife and business duo Greg and Ails McGee are looking forward to the next stage but in the meantime they are “ready to go out with an incendiary confetti of contemporary collectibles”, as Greg puts it.
“Every chapter comes to an end,” says Ails, “And before we launch Part Two, we thought let’s finish our tenure at Tower Street by going full circle. We started back in 2005 with a Richard Barnes show, and I had just finished teaching his daughter Chantal Barnes as an A-Level student at Huntington School.
“The idiosyncratic vigour with which Chantal Barnes pushes paint around is a wholly new visual idea,” says According To McGee co-director Greg McGee
“Chantal is now an internationally sought-after artist and has work appearing in Vogue magazine, while Richard has retired from teaching at Bootham School and is now a full-time painter after moving south from York.”
Barnes at the double goes on show at According To McGee today. “This is a victory lap for us,” says Greg. “We are in many ways going back to our source with Richard’s York cityscapes, but the art scene in York has changed so much, and the paintings of both Barneses are now so collectible, that though we’re tipping the hat to our first exhibition, we’re much more excited about the here and now.
“The York that Richard paints feels very contemporary, very now, and the idiosyncratic vigour with which Chantal pushes paint around is a wholly new visual idea.”
Richard Barnes delivers the new Barnes + Barnes collections to the According To McGee curatorial team, Nell Bannister and Rhys Davies Brackett
Greg looks back fondly over the McGees’ Tower Street years. “Richard really helped to galvanise our business plan back in 2005, which was at that point a general desire to exhibit exciting art. He helped distil that down into an irreducible manifesto.
“Go primarily for paintings, paintings that are instantly recognisable as being from the McGee stable. Grab the attention of passers-by, paint the gallery front yellow, which, although a Choir of Vision inception, had its roots in the initial vision Richard helped us shape.
“Since then, we’ve exhibited Elaine Thomas CBE; Dave Pearson; ska legend Horace Panter, of The Specials. We’ve had exhibitions officially opened by Sir Ian Botham, when we launched art from Dubai celebrity artist Jim Wheat; 1960s’ painter and friend of The Beatles Doug Binder has had solo shows here.
Magical Monk Bar, by Richard Barnes
“It’s been a wild and fulfilling ride here, opposite York’s most recognisable landmark [Clifford’s Tower], but the time has come to leave the building, and we’re doing it in style with Barnes + Barnes.”
Contemporary Painting: Barnes + Barnes’ straddles According To McGee’s past as gallerists but also looks forward. “As an exhibition, it transcends this building, and so we’ll be ready to run it again in the future,” vows Greg.
“Where that will be, we can’t yet say, but that unpredictability, with the liberty and excitement that come with it, was the reason we got into running an art gallery in the first place. This exhibition reflects that. As soon as Chapter II emerges over the horizon, we’ll let you know.”
Contemporary Painting: Barnes + Barnes runs from today (23/7/2022) to Sunday, September 25, at According To McGee, Tower Street, York. For more information, visit www.accordingtomcgee.com
Everything in modulation:Scarborough artist David Finnigan with his Synthesis works at According To McGee
ACCORDING To McGee plays host to a “double happening”, Contemporary Painting: Elementals and Synthesis by Freya Horsley and David Finnigan, from this weekend in York.
Co-director Greg McGee sees the summer exhibition as an opportunity to reaffirm the Tower Street gallery’s manifesto. “Not so much a duo show, more like two exhibitions in one gallery,” he says. “Freya Horsley and David Finnigan are far removed in terms of subject and mark making, but there’s enough intersection to be able to build an event like this.
“Their common ground is a fearlessness with what contemporary painting can do, and we find that the proximity of both collections in the same gallery not only augments the collections respectively, but also highlights the strengths of each other.
Out Of Darkness, mixed media, by Freya Horsley
“There are flickering moments in all of the paintings here, and a lot of the magic is found in the disparate synergy”.
Elementals and Synthesis is “like nothing According To McGee has exhibited previously in its 17 years”, reckons Greg. “We’re used to dovetailing the collections of painters who share similar visions, whereas this time we have really gone for a discrepancy that cracks open not only the magic of the paintings we have here, but says something about painting in general.”
David Finnigan’s Synthesis is characteristically exact, although he is at pains to highlight how his art has evolved. “These four works represent, for me, a change in the direction of my working practice,” says the Scarborough hyperrealist.
“While they retain some of the exactitude and realism of my previous work, there’s more of a painterly feel to these new pieces. Also, a new aesthetic, which exhibits an expressive freedom within the confines of realist painting.
Low Pitch, by David Finnigan, from his Synthesis series
“They embrace some of the techniques I’ve learned and developed in my other non-visual creative outlets, particularly from the world of sound.”
Not only a looser approach to the confines of realist painting is applied, but so are an amalgamation and superimposition of separate geometric compositions over the existing realist composition.
“These geometric abstractions function aesthetically in their own right, and they have a force and a dynamic that adds energy,” says David. “Visually, in isolation, these geometric compositions echo the work of the constructivists, the suprematists, or even futurism and vorticism from the early 20th century.
“Added together with the realist composition, they ‘modulate’ the existing work, changing the dynamic through the use of the aforementioned energy, but equally importantly through the use of colour, which is a very powerful tool. The now superimposed compositions, ‘modulate’ each other.”
Dolphin Hotel, by David Finnigan
Regarding the concept of “modulation”, David sees a simple parallel in the world of sound with the technique of FM or “Frequency Modulation” synthesis – which, as a side note, powered the soundscape of 1980’s pop and rock music.
“Simply put, in ‘FM’ synthesis, one waveform modulates the other wave to create something new. This is what I’m attempting visually,” he says.
“Another important parallel is the idea of ‘glitch’, a sub-genre of electronic music that became popular in the 1990s, but actually its origins again can be traced back all the way to futurism, specifically with Luigi Russolo’s piece The Art Of Noises.
“Here again, I attempt to apply the concept of ‘glitch’ visually to these compositions, in which, as in music – where the beat and order of the music is broken and reprocessed so some feeling of order remains – I would like to break up the surface of the two superimposed compositions to break up the order and reprocess it to create something new that has a different rhythm.”
York artist Freya Horsley with her Elementals works at According To McGee
Freya Horsley’s return to According To McGee comes after a sell-out exhibition of the York artist’s winter collection of elemental seascapes. “They were huge!” says gallery co-director Ails McGee, “They were the biggest paintings we have ever exhibited here, and that’s some claim.
“But they connected well with browsers and clients alike, with one going to a collector’s house in Poppleton and one travelling all the way to Glasgow.”
Freya’s depictions of the sea and land resonate still more in our era of nature’s curtailment. “The sheer scale of some of the paintings has only added to that,” says Ails.
Until We’re Seen, by Freya Horsley
Freya’s new Elementals series builds on her trademark bristling light and spray but Ails point to new developments too. “Freya has always, from time to time, primed her canvasses with neon paint, which helps to endow her otherwise layered sense of peace and serenity with a bounce and inner-lit joy,” she says.
“This time, the joy she skewers comes from a wild attack of neon paint on top of the tender and elemental background, rather than beneath it; a technique most obvious in her massive work Out Of Darkness. It’s a radical step for her and really amps up the wide-eyed sense of wonder that Elementals celebrates.”
Asked to predict the next direction of Contemporary Painting’s evolution, Greg points to Finnigan’s paintings. “These are painted in egg tempera. That’s something that goes back thousands of years and was used in ancient times. It fell into disuse with the popularisation of oil painting in Europe in the 15th century,” he says.
“But now David is using it with a showman’s chutzpah. So, is this retro, or is this radical and contemporary? It feels a little like when a rock band performs an ‘MTV Unplugged’ session. There’s nowhere to hide but in the quality of the songs, and in a multimedia age, there’s something radical in that.”
Bee-Bop, by David Finnigan
David agrees: “In my eyes it has the capacity to be beautiful and elegant, in the medium itself,” he says. “It is egg yolk, water and pigment and, if non-toxic pigments are used, completely inert. But it is also beautiful and elegant in the aesthetic effect of the finished work itself.
“In our modern day of awareness of sustainability and our ever-increasing eco-friendly approaches to life in general, egg tempera actually fits in well with these philosophies, and maybe it will have its day in the sun again.”
Contemporary Painting: Elementals and Synthesis by Freya Horsley and David Finnigan runs from Saturday, June 18 to Monday, July 11 at According To McGee, Tower Street, York; open Monday to Saturday, 12 noon to 4pm.
YORK artist Carol Douglas is the latest addition to According To McGee’s year-long celebration of contemporary painting to mark the Tower Street gallery’s 16th birthday in York.
“Actually, we were supposed to be holding events and happenings with performance artists, lasers, illuminations and installations, but Covid came and kicked that into the long grass,” says gallery co-director Greg McGee.
“And we’re glad it did, in a sense. It forced us to re-address ourselves as a gallery and distil what we do best into something unique, which is exhibit painting as though it was the edgiest, most crucial artform on the scene – which it is, by the way.”
Greg’s garrulousness has been vindicated by an autumn spike in sales of paintings by artists such as wife and co-director Ails McGee and Newcastle’s Beth Ross.
“What Carol’s art has that sets it apart is a steely dedication to noticing the domestic and elevating it into the sublime,” says According To McGee co-director Ails McGee
“The time for making contemporary painting the gallery’s priority seems to be now, and it is with this in mind that we approached Carol Douglas,” says Ails.
“We love Carol’s art, which dovetails very neatly with the rest of the current exhibition: in essence an evolving version of the summer show, with painting leading the way.
“What Carol’s art has that sets it apart, however, is a steely dedication to noticing the domestic and elevating it into the sublime. So, we have a bowl of fruit composed as it if it were weightless, or a chair rendered as if lit from within with flat, languid light, like a flag. All the time there is experimentation and mischief, made obvious by sudden placements of colour and playful lines.”
Carol Douglas: Hygge and Expressionism, an exclusive collection of paintings for According To McGee, launches today (Saturday, October 17) and marks a first for the McGees.
“Carol Douglas’s paintings have that crucial human warmth that, even via minimal expressionism, good art reminds us that things aren’t so bad,” says Greg McGee
“It is the first time that we will be simultaneously inaugurating an exhibition both physically and online via the gallery’s social media,” says Greg. “The nature of the opening matters less than the nature of the paintings, though.
“People have been obliged to stay at home and contemplate their homes. Interior-design decisions have been increasingly important for Brits for the past 20 years, and I should know: I was a judge on the BBC’s Best House In Town.
“The Danish concept of ‘hygge’ is attractive and simple. It means maximum cosiness with minimalist clutter. It’s a nice way to live. Carol’s art seems to compound that, with its wet pebble palette and gentle compositions.”
Greg adds: “It’s especially powerful because it’s so idiosyncratic. You can walk in a room and even if you don’t know the artist, you see the painting and go, ‘ah yes, there’s that painter whose Still Lifes are so crisp and exact’.
“I hope that people who see my work find it both visually exciting and somewhat amusing,” says Carol Douglas
“They have that crucial human warmth that, even via minimal expressionism, good art reminds us that things aren’t so bad. There’s a glow in life that even 2020 can’t extinguish.”
Summing up her latest paintings, Carol says: “I hope that people who see my work find it both visually exciting and somewhat amusing. The domestic has always been my focus and speaks of my personality and history.”
Hygge and Expressionism will run at According To McGee, Tower Street, York, from today until October 26. The gallery is open every Saturday or by appointment on weekdays via accordingtomcgee.com/pages/contact or on 01904 671709 or 07973 653702. Alternatively, view online at: accordingtomcgee.com/collections/carol-douglas
Did you know?
Carol Douglas won the Adult & Access Award for Art & Design Lifelong Student of the Year in 2018.
