With their kaleidoscopic array of images and words arranged on un-stretchedcanvas, Jeff Gibbons’ paintings are instantly recognisable. Sometimes the ideas are played out on small canvases but more often they are large and in recent years he has developed the idea of walk-in paintings that we will be exhibiting in the adjacent project space.

Made from groups of large canvases fixed to simple wooden structures these walk-in works literally form their own environment and enclose the viewer within the created space.

Like many artists today, Gibbons recognises the increasing difficulty that painters, or any artist, has to make work which is not quoting or overlapping with ideas from the past or with others. However, he believes that this dilemma of the expression of ideas now can be made possible by working within what one might call parenthesis; “ an explanation, qualification, aside or afterthought …marked off by brackets or commas” as described by the dictionary definition, or by the poet David Jones in his book Parenthesis (1937) where his use of the word denotes a “space between … as you turn aside to do something else“ that “our curious type of existence here is all together in parenthesis”.

Making works that can suggest the grandeur of cinematic scale or the confined spaces of a Renaissance chapel scattered with images of the sacred story, his canvases often contain sequences of images rather like groups of film stills. Interlaced with a written quotation - or a single word – these paintings become interlocking layers of visual and literary meaning that go beyond the pictorial yet remain unmistakably within the domain of painting.

Word play in the visual arts is a very established tradition from the automatic writing of the surrealists, to rebuses in Magritte and the scrawled words employed by artists such as Schnabel and Kiefer, and it’s also one that Gibbons exploits. His choice of image is also significant, often these are ciphers and when combined with words the range of associated references become something like a puzzle or a riddle to which there is no answer.

A prizewinner in the John Moores 19 at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool and the 1997 Nat West Prize he was born in England in 1962 and studied at Ravensbourne (1980-81), Middlesex Polytechnic (1981- 84) and London University (1989 – 91).