Duncan McAfee
Studio tours available from 20th - 25th June: please email duncan@duncanmcafee.com to book.
Artist Bio
Duncan McAfee is a London based British artist and painter.
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Duncan is represented by Felix H Wilkinson.
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Artist’s Statement
McAfee essentially approaches painting as a game. He arranges figurative and abstract elements from art and visual culture to make hybrid paintings, brightly coloured, comic-book exquisite-corpses.
His recent Exploding Heads series could be portraits of the mad prophets of some post apocalyptic cult. Constructed from broken fragments of other images, misremembered or misquoted, like Russell Hoban’s Punch puppet in the novel Ridley Walker. McAfee draws on Hoban, “the way Punch is misappropriated and all wrong is funny and grotesque but the weight and meaning it takes on is also deeply affecting. I want to try and get close to that conflict of feelings in my paintings”. This collage style evokes a surrealist “chance encounter” but also perhaps like Burroughs’ cut-ups, a form of time travel.
McAfee returns to the idea of “self-collaboration” that he started exploring in sound works in the 2010s. Like Beckett’s Krapp going over his birthday tapes, interacting with, sometimes mocking his former and future selves McAfee’s thinking about the spaces between layers of process, how aware the perpetrator of each action is of the other, different selves. “I imagine a kind simultaneity of time-space where the image might exist in all states of completion as though the days were layered up like sheets of acetate.”
Most recently he’s been developing a large scale, 5m wide transposition of Da Vinci’s Last Supper thinking in terms of contemporary ideological and psychological landscapes. It’s perhaps the archetypal image of a moment of transition, marking the end of one life and the beginning of whole religious tradition, a new world. Inevitably McAfee approaches it in his own exaggerated cartoon way so the scene becomes a maddened party/argument and the characters explode and dissolve into one-another. Perhaps this is his most political work to date but, he says “to be honest I’m more interested in the history of the fresco itself and how that relates to the layered approach to my paintings. What we see of the original now has had layers added and removed several times by restorers, been reassembled like a jigsaw from paint fragments rescued from the floor, bits chopped out of it – it’s incredible to think about the history of the surface and how many layers of process have been applied then removed since it was supposedly completed”.
Artist influences range from Nigel Cooke’s recurring characters, George Condo’s Psychological Cubism, revisiting Francis Bacon, the fanaticism of classical religious painting, and also outsider Ralph Bakshi’s animation and recent paintings of clowns and mobsters. McAfee’s painting technique plays back and forth between very loose chance actions and tight, illustrative drawing/painting. This creates a tension that makes us unsure if the image is in the process of forming or breaking apart. It’s in a state of transition and meaning is uncertain, much like the world around us.
Artist CV
2016 – What Is Done Cannot Be Undone, OVADA, Oxford, UK
2014 – The Undersong, Heritage Lottery Funding, permanent installation, Norfolk, UK
2013 – Queen Elizabeth Woods Commision, permanent installation, Andover, UK
2012 – Talking Trail, Permanent installation, Buckinghamshire, UK
2011 – 2012 – Cocheme Fellow AIR, Byam Shaw/Central St Martins Fellowship, London
2011 – Your Voice Travels, five-part radio series commissioned for Resonance FM, London
2010 – The Museum Suite, UCL collection, London
