David
McKay
Monday 28th June - Saturday 3rd July 2004
Background
McKay’s work has become synonymous with popular youth and surf culture.
His unique style and dry wit has helped define and drive the irreverent
and cult surf wear label, Mambo for over fifteen years.
After completing several large-scale public commissions in Australia,
he designed and painted the 2003 celebratory ceiling mural for the Mambo
flagship store in London. It can be seen in the Carnaby Street store.
The 2001 prestigious BHP Australia Art on Steel People’s Choice
was MacKay’s most recent award and his work is held in significant
public collections throughout Australia. He has exhibited in Sydney, London,
New York, Tokyo, Mexico and Florence through group and solo shows. This
is his first solo show in London.
McKay uses his extensive travels as a director for film, music video and
television commercials as inspiration.
Born 1959, Sydney.
Exhibition
Profile: David McKay
Stylistically paraphrasing cultural clichés and iconic images,
David McKay creates an alluring pastiche alive with colour and form in
his current exhibition ‘Life’s Rich…’. He plays
with themes of intimacy, innocence, trust and menace as he isolates his
subjects from reality.
Bold, painterly interpretations of cultural Mexico and India were early
carriers of McKay’s work. Over the years, it has evolved to celebrate
the eye-candy confections of pop culture, which he infuses with fecund
and seductive floral and symbolic imagery.
In ‘Life’s Rich. . .’, he juxtaposes his vibrantly charged
iconic and traditional themes on diverse mediums including thrift store
and mass produced machine woven tapestries and lustrous automotive enamelled
canvas with hot rod pin striping.
The relationship he creates between medium and subject is always beguiling
and often potent. You get the feeling you can reach right in and touch.
It’s this kind of immediacy, infused with the tensions inherent
in his subjects, that makes his new work so appealing.
The Coningby Gallery
30 Tottenham Street
London
W1T 4RJ
tel: 020 7636 7478
www.coningsbygallery.com
Gallery Opening Hours: 9.30am - 5.30pm Monday-Friday
11.00am - 4.00pm Saturdays
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