Born 1967
Lives Glasgow
Cars and Houses
2008
Oil on canvas
102x153cm
Courtesy Sorcha Dallas and Stuart Shave/Modern Art
Alan Michael’s paintings and silk-screened canvases, which are occasionally accompanied by texts, investigate the peculiar economy of quotation – its sanctions and rewards. Drawing on an almost overwhelmingly wide range of source material, from celebrated figurative painters (Amedeo Modigliani, Lucian Freud) to fashion (designer Diane von Furstenberg, Cheaney brogues), film (Jean-Luc Godard, Lynne Ramsay) and, most recently, the Mini car, works such as Repeat Study, Mini One (2007) suggest neither a hierarchy nor an equivalence of value but rather a studied ambivalence towards what and how things mean. The result is work that complicates the now common strategy of appropriation, both in contemporary art and in our wider culture, and draws attention to the itchiness of our borrowed clothes. (TM)
