Stuart Barnes worked in advertising for ten years before returning to University to study Fine Art at Chelsea College of Art in London where he is currently completing his BA. For the past two years Stuart has been selected for the University of the Arts London’s showcase of the best undergraduate work. This year, from over 600 submissions, less than 30 works were selected by the jury led by Sacha Craddock, the influential curator and chairperson of Bloomberg New Contemporaries, so this was a great achivement for Stuart.
“My artistic practice is concerned with doubt and creating states of uncertainty: between the work and the person interacting with it, and its historical and spatial context. Through continually adopting established styles and media - including painting, film, performance, sculpture and texts – I infect existing systems of representation and play with cultural narratives about art and the role of the artist. My experience of working in advertising informs this strategy.My series of paintings on tracing paper, based on prints from Francisco Goya’s ‘Los Caprichos’ attempt to translate the sublime draftsmanship and anachronistic metaphors of the original, monochrome etchings into highly coloured ‘copies’ that employ the visual language of gestural, abstract painting.”
