Toby Paterson ‘Consensus and Collapse’

Toby Paterson makes paintings, reliefs and constructions which explore the relationship between abstraction and reality. He has a keen interest in post-war modernist architecture which he deconstructs both materially and politically, developing a practice in which some works are almost understandable as architecture, while others are expressions of purely abstract form.

Paterson was born in Glasgow in 1974, and still lives and works in the city. He has exhibited nationally and internationally, and in 2002 was the winner of the Beck’s Futures art prize. As well as his more gallerybased practice, he makes art for the public realm, and was recently the recipient of several public commissions, notably the completed Powder Blue Orthogonal Pavilion, part of the Portavilion project in London and Poised Array, a work made for the façade of the BBC Scotland Headquarters in Glasgow. Paterson has also been appointed lead artist on the extension to the Docklands Light Railway for the London Olympics in 2012.

Paterson’s work is as influenced by the architecture of Denys Lasdun, Cedric Price, and Andy MacMillan and Isi Metzstein at Gillespie Kidd & Coia as it is by the constructivist painting of Kenneth and Mary Martin, Ben Nicholson and Victor Pasmore, yet it makes its meaning primarily as painting rather than urban planning or architectural model-making. This exhibition is an opportunity to explore both the complexity and the consistency of Paterson’s practice in the context.

Exhibition supported by The Henry Moore Foundation.