Solo Exhibition: Michael Stubbs, 'studioshowflow', Crownlands Studio, Sizewell, Suffolk, UK

For the first time, I presented new paintings from 2021-23 as an installation in my Sizewell studio. l transformed my working space, including my paint splattered floor, into a painting environment which was specially curated in conjunction with the artist Glenn Brown. For more than thirty years my varied work has touched on painting endgames, mutations of the grid, decorative excess, and the interweaving of process and abstraction. Since the early 2000s I have consistently used processes of visual layering as an open-ended, improvisatory painting style that shows fragmentations of signage and text. My paintings are constructed by combining poured, abstract configurations of transparent varnishes and opaque household paints with ready-made graphic stencils. The repeated pouring, in conjunction with the signs, form a physical process of flat-on-flat layering that reveals multiple perspectives and optical depths. In this way the paintings work through a series of impulses, riffs, accidents, false-starts and changes of mind, to arrive at a moment of dynamic complexity that can’t be planned. For this unique solo showcase, I incorporated digital images of studio materials and tools to refer the viewer to the act of making a painting in the age of internet overload. Significantly and for this exhibition, Glenn Brown and I combined my single paintings into multi-panels to exaggerate the complexities of the finished paintings as juxtaposed combines that reveal compositional, colour and subject(ive) overlaps not previously available in their former iterations. This combination of panels, which also now include digital posters, offers possibilities for a more expanded research painting project that hitherto remained hidden