With their network of pipes woven through a dense bubblescape brimming with incident, Jeffrey Dennis’s paintings are instantly recognisable. In the twenty or so years since graduating from the Slade School of Fine Art he has developed this very personal language to observe and comment on all aspects of his life.

Evocative of electrical conduit, drainage ducts or the fragments of early clay tobacco pipes that he forages for along the edges of the Thames at low tide, the pipes form both the structure of the painting and platforms for countless figures that trudge through the haphazard landscape. Other images find their way into the bubblescape as a series of vignettes strung together like a story line in a graphic novel, that record events of political, cultural or personal history. Starting from images assembled from photographs, magazines and video stills, a cast of characters, props and settings are assembled and then shuffled and manipulated at will to form interlocking narratives of a particular aspect of the world that has caught his fascination. There are disparities of content and abrupt distortions of scale that destroy the logic of the pictorial space, and there are collisions of the ordinary and the extraordinary that create a surrealistic fusion of images; an expressive, almost cinematic vision, that incorporates ideas of time, dreams, memory, things seen and things imagined.Jeffrey Dennis has exhibited regularly in the UK and internationally since 1979 and this will be his second solo exhibition at Art Space Gallery. He has had solo exhibitions at Whitechapel Art Gallery (1986), Orchard Gallery, Derry (1993) and regularly in New York and Milan. The inclusion of his work in prestigious group exhibitions include the John Moores (1999, 97, 93), The British Art Show 3, the British Council’s New Voices that toured worldwide (1991-97) and Drawing Distinctions (2003). His work is held in numerous permanent collections throughout the world including Arts Council of England, Tate Gallery, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Foundation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris and private collections in Europe, America and the UK.