Meet the artist

Paula Kane

The work of London based artist Paula Kane’s (born 1970) consists of a series of landscape paintings executed with accurate and careful brushstrokes, which look oddly familiar. On closer inspection, one realises the works are composed from exact renderings of elements of paintings from the Renaissance to the Pre-Raphaelites: a tree from a Mantegna, a cloud from a Titian. The imagery taken from different historical paintings is mixed to contemporary elements – a suburban golf course, a cartoon like fecund flower – and almost ‘collaged’ together in one composition.

 

Sourced from an exhaustive archive of reproductions the result is hyper idealised landscapes, which are familiar and evocative yet impossible and unknowable. Kane describes how a detail from an old master painting can become a catalyst for a painting, and how her finished work is as much a homage to the beauty of art past as it scrutinises the themes of cultural tourism and genre.

 

Structured with economy and regulation, they are constructions of constructions- allusions of an illusion. Kane’s paintings are inspired by a mixture of surrealism, photo-realist painting, comic book aesthetics and oriental imagery; this art historical referencing is fused with Kane’s highly contemporary sensibility.

 

Work by this artist