Things unmade, remembered, forgotten brings together a group of small paintings made over the past four years by Ian Parker.

Parker’s work is grounded in the material practice of painting, the modernist notion of painting as matter, its status and process as material.

A work may begin with a specific idea or as a vague reaction; a response to a thought, a shape, map colour keys, other works, studio paraphernalia, everyday domestic objects, drawings, a piece of information. This can be emotional, political, aesthetic, material or intellectual, and often a combination of all these elements. This experiential flux is mediated through the language of painting; received, learnt, remembered, questioned, discarded and rediscovered. And always the thing itself as it unfolds through the act of making, an accretion, a kind of muscle memory.

Parker writes,

I don’t begin works with any preconceived notion of what they will end up like. What would be the point of that! However, there are consistent pictorial concerns which emerge through deliberately simple, even banal, working processes. These concerns repeatedly explore colour, shape, rhythm, surface, figure / ground relationships, scale, the interaction of flattened and recessive space, and often horizontal divisions. I construct as much as paint paintings, and when the emergent elements of the work coalesce, they perhaps speak back to me, and hopefully to others, of ‘things the mind already knows’ but obliquely, without explicitly naming them. Whatever else, painting is always about painting. What a painting is, was, or might be. What’s remembered, partially recalled, and sometimes revealed.

In the introduction to Discrepant Abstraction, Kobena Mercer identifies an approach to abstraction that denies notions of homogeneity and ‘purity’, and is described as ‘discrepant, hybrid, partial, elusive, obstinate, and strange.’

Kobena Mercer, Discrepant Abstraction (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006)

‘Before color becomes the mysterious and complex force it has been theorized to be, before it is a philosophical or alchemical problem, or a socio-economic demarcation, color is a material, a tool, the ready-at-hand colored stuff that you wield in making a painting.’

Sillman Amy, ‘On Colour’, Faux Pas Selected Writings and Drawings: After 8 Books, 2024

General Information

Window Gallery

Exhibition Dates: 5 September – 5 October 2025

Open Wednesday – Sunday, 12:00 – 17:00

Private View:

• Friday 19 September, 18:00 – 20:00

Find the Artist:

Instagram: www.instagram.com/iparkermurl

Website: ianparker.org.uk