Archive of work by graduates from the renowned MFA Programme at GSA

Degree show installation of paintings Ruit and Lumis
Both H. 72” x W. 55”
2012
Aliad
Acrylic, Marker, Charcoal, Paper on Canvas
H.59” x W.47”
2012
Ellsa
Acrylic, Charcoal, Marker, Cardboard, Tape on Canvas
H.40” x W.30”
2012
Homeless Abstraction (carrying paintings Saivail and Picni)
Cardboard, Staples, MDF, Wood, House Paint, Nails, Screws and Castor Wheels
H. 8’ x W. 8’ x 34”
Saivail
Acrylic, Charcoal, Wrapping Paper on Cardboard
H.20” x W.16”
2012
vvvvv
Silkscreen on Somerset Velvet 280 gm
H.44½” x W.20¼”
2012

Brent Ridge

Brent Ridge was born and raised in Flint, MI, USA. He attended Michigan State University and was awarded a BFA (cum laude) in Studio Art in 1998. He spent the subsequent decade as an artist in New York City, where he frequently exhibits his work, before travelling to Scotland to attend the Glasgow School of Art.

Statement

Light, heavy, thick, thin, viscous, sticky, runny, blotchy, luminous: these terms are the descriptions of paint and what paint does, and I am interested in pursuing abstract painting’s problems through a process of transformation with a multiplicity of forms and materials. The disjuncture between the modern and the postmodern consciousness remains a fertile arena of exploration to me where the fragments of painting play out in an endless complex game of image making. Hints of representation, like the landscape or the figurative, make their way into the image as a paradoxical element in these paintings, contradicting the purity of their abstract surfaces, and unravel the makings of their synthetic construction. My works are treated in an arena of displacement, and that reveals itself through their reworked surfaces or partially erased or obscured forms, using paint or its substitutes to create various registers of juxtaposition that investigate a tenuous sense of space. I see extensions to paint’s workings beyond the brush through collage, silkscreen, photography and even hardware tools, and these devices expand my explorations of visual material through a painterly process of investigation.