Turner Prize Nominee George Shaw Comes Home

Herbert Art Gallery Coventry offers the Chance to win an original Shaw

Turner Prize Nominee George Shaw is exhibiting his paintings for the first time in the city that they depict. This collection of works illustrate places many viewers will recognise, the specific pubs, street corners, rows of garages, trees and shops, but less familiar is the unsettling resonance that Shaw brings to the work. Displayed alongside these landscapes is a new series of watercolours of previously painted places as they exist here and now. Using Humbrol enamels, Shaw began creating his paintings in a fit of nostalgia after he had left home and moved away. Over time, the paintings became a kind of ‘I woz ere’ written in retrospect. Accompanying the exhibition, Shaw also presents the works of art he made as a child in the early 1970s to the summer before he went to art school in 1985.

George Shaw is a painter of nostalgia; his subject matter is drawn exclusively from a half–mile radius around Tile Hill, a post-war housing estate on the edge of Coventry in the West Midlands that was Shaw’s home until the age of 18. But contrary to what we might expect given this highly personal connection with his work, Shaw’s paintings seem somewhat unemotional. Not only are they devoid of human life, there are, moreover, no discernable geographical features that might evoke a particular town or region; these images could have been taken from any one of a myriad of similar estates in England. Shaw’s painting, then, is at once extremely personal and extremely detached and anodyne. His aim is not to conjure up a rose-tinted past but to document the effects of the passage of time on his former home, the jarring new additions to this environment since his time there.

An EXCLUSIVE competition to WIN an original George Shaw watercolour is on offer as Coventry Gets Creative!
Here’s how to enter: There are two prizes in the George Shaw: I woz ere competition. Entrants aged 15 and under will be entered for a special commendation prize of a £50 voucher to spend in the Herbert Shop. The top prize will be Shaw’s original watercolour which all entrants, regardless of age will have the chance of winning.

Winners will be picked by a panel of judges from across the region.
Choose a Coventry scene… let us know you are entering … get creative…

It couldn’t be easier to enter:

1. Choose a Coventry landscape that means something to you

2. Download an application form from here, or from the Resources box on the right of this page.

3. Get Creative … through paint, photography, collage, sculpture or any way you please

George Shaw: I woz ere Fri 18 November – Sun 11 March 2012 For the past 15 years, recent Turner Prize nominee George Shaw has been making paintings of the Tile Hill housing estate where he grew up.

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