During the summer months of 2011 and 2012 Paul Winstanley travelled throughout England, Scotland and Wales photographing unpopulated art school studios, including the iconic Glasgow School of Art that was later severely damaged by fire in 2014. The imagery, selected from over 200 photographs, provided the source material for this new series of work.  Winstanley is well-known for his paintings of uninhabited landscapes, deserted passages, lobbies, walkways and interiors. He has always been conscious of the generic spaces in which we live and work. The empty art school studio appealed as a site of creative potential, unrealised, tarnished through use.

Shown at the point when the studios have been vacated during each school’s summer break, these once busy interiors have become abstracted spaces that remind us of the colour field paintings of Barnett Newman and Brice Marden, with only hints of the creativity that is fostered there; paint stains, marked walls and worn furniture. The depiction of empty, unpopulated studios is a timely reminder that the existence of art schools, perceived by many as the key to Britain’s creative success, is now more tenuous than ever. Currently plagued by rising tuition fees, mounting student debt, and governmental cuts to arts funding, art schools have changed dramatically over the last 20 to 30 years, and the Art School series subtly captures this prescient moment. Already some studios depicted in this archive no longer exist. 

Winstanley’s body of work presents us with the basic template of ‘art school’, of its environment and its function. Winstanley comments, “This art school model - devised in the UK in the early 1960s mostly - has become the default model for art school education all over the world. At a very simple level I just wanted to show what that looked like.”

Biographical notes

Paul Winstanley was born in Manchester in June 1954. He studied painting at Cardiff College of Art from 1973-76 and the Slade from 1976-78. Schooled in the orthodoxies of abstract Modernism, Winstanley spent a decade after college establishing a new visual language, combining the tenets of minimalism with the pictorialism of photography. His breakthrough showing of the large painting 'Walkway' at the Whitechapel Open in 1989 won him the first prize Unilever Award. He went on to enjoy a year as Kettle's Yard artist in residence in Cambridge, hosted by Churchill College with Newnham College providing the Old Lab in the gardens as a studio. In this supportive environment he created a new body of work shown first at Kettle's Yard and then on tour within the UK. Throughout the 1990's Winstanley developed an array of related imagery of semi-public, post-war interior spaces; of waiting rooms, lounges, TV rooms, walkways and lobbies; creating a meditation on the utility of English modernism and its concurrent political underpinnings. Along with his landscapes viewed from moving vehicles this work culminated first in his1993 show 'Driven Landscapes' at Camden Arts Centre and then in his 1997/98 Art Now show 'Annexe' at Tate, Millbank.

Following a serious road accident and recovery he emerged with a new emphasis on the transience of the interior/exterior relationship, notably in the diaphanous and translucent series of paintings 'Veil' which he pursued intermitantly over a ten year period and of images of modernist architectural interiors with large plate-glass picture windows evoking the sublime. He had a major retrospective of his work at Art Space, Auckland, New Zealand in 2008.

The role of the viewer is central to an understanding of Winstanley's paintings and his occasional use of the figure echoes that active passivity. Engrossed, they watch, look, wait, smoke, phone, text.

In 2013, his photographic project 'Art School' was published by Karsten Schubert’s Ridinghouse publishing house. Focussing on the empty, tarnished studio they picture a teaching and creative environment on the cusp of existential change. The images became the basis for a new, extended body of work using the art school studio interior as a model from which to explore divergent painterly concerns, from the tropes of Dutch 17th Century interior painting to American mid-century minimalist abstraction. This necessitated a change in practice, painting on wood and aluminium panels instead of stretched linen. This change of materiality has opened up new possibilities, creating new and unexpected lines of thought.

In 2018, Winstanley produced his new book '59 Paintings; In which the artist considers the process of thinking about and making work', an episodic account of his practice and thought processes as seen through the lens of individual paintings (published by Art/Books).

Winstanley has shown regularly in Los Angeles, New York, Dublin, London, Paris and Hamburg. He has work in the collections of Tate (London), MoMA (New York), MoCA (Los Angeles), IMMA (Dublin), The British Library, The New York City Public Library, Southampton City Art Gallery, ACGB, British Council. He lives and works in London.