I Feel It In My Bones, 15 paintings in various sizes, executed in oil paint on raw canvas, takes its departure in John Copeland’s focused interest in the energy of the initial gesture of the painting. The translation of emotion through body motion to canvas, in a conscious but unfiltered manner. The new group of works are about letting go, letting go of the anxieties of painting, while confrontationally motivating simultaneously constricting, and through that process, creating room for a more intuitive expression. Vibrant brush and line work, paint applied with a sculptural approach rising from the canvas. Applied, scraped and pulled, every gesture intact, the very motion recorded.
Bold, dynamic and stripped down, while synchronously poetically elusive. Figurative and abstract, earnest, precise, ambiguous and disarmingly loose, this new body of work stands as a jubilant testament to the year long process Copeland has undertaken in its creation.
John Copeland, born 1976, lives and works in New York, USA. Recent exhibitions include The Birds, CHART Art Fair, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen, Denmark, 2019, New Mythologies: Figurative Abstraction in Contemporary Painting, Huxley-Parlour, London, UK, 2019, Your Heaven Looks Just Like My Hell, Newport Street Gallery, London UK, 2018. I Feel It In My Bones is Copeland’s sixth exhibition with V1 Gallery / Eighteen.
