28 June – 29 July 2007
One in the Other is pleased to present the drawings of Robert McNally in his first solo exhibition.
Robert McNally’s high definition drawings are a combination of dense miniaturisation, allegorical iconography and technical sophistication. They take their lead from a notion of make-believe and visual metaphor, depicting a series of tangential juxtapositions, weird characters, creatures and exterior/interior spaces; built around an inviolably precise articulation of minutiae. The drawings also play with notions of the absurd, the gothic, and the surreal, as seen through a world of artifice and assimilation. Yet, they articulate rich visual narratives, demonstrating complex conceptual themes transposed into visual reverie.
McNally draws from memory, mediating thoughts and emotions into a world away from the language of words. Many of his works have a starting point based on his experience of a place, or text, or visual form, or just based on an abstract state of mind. His drawings cram a universe-into-an-atom type of density into worlds of colliding possibilities. The subject matter morphing into a layered, multi-textured unravelling of story threads, emptying out into fluent, linear, pictorial fictions.
Gonzo (2005), a crazed mix of cacti and fly agaric mushrooms that dwarf Doric columns, Victorian railway arches and motorways, reveals an affinity with Terry Gilliam’s surreal Monty Python artwork combined with a penchant for tripped out, Hunter S. Thomson-style weirdness. For So How Was It? (2006), a pagoda nestles on top of a precarious stack of giant biscuits. Its base of Kit Kats, shortbread and Bourbons forms an inverted pyramid, onto a double row of milk biscuits, balanced house-of-cards style. The work was inspired by trip to Japan, where freeways, skyscrapers, traditional buildings and the precisely made yet fragile cardboard dwellings of the homeless all jostle one another in cities built on earthquake fault-lines. McNally’s obsessive involvement with the act of drawing is coupled with a boyish love of iconic transgressors, and though produced over extended periods of time, each work sparks a big bang and a new universe with each undertaking. (Skye Sherwin)
Robert McNally currently lives and works in Newcastle. He graduated from Camberwell College of Art, London in 2005.
Making it with Tom Lowe and Howard Hughes 2007
Graphite on paper,
120 x 104cm
Making it with Tom Lowe and Howard Hughes (detail) 2007
Graphite on paper,
120 x 104cm
World War II 2007
Graphite on paper,
150 x 150cm