Page 5 - Art First: Dan Sturgis: Strict and Lax
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DANIEL STURGIS


                        HISTORY PAINTINGS


                        charles darwent





                        Look down the list of Daniel Sturgis’s solo exhibitions and a pattern begins 
                        to emerge. Two patterns, in fact. To every title, there is an equal and opposite
                        title—Everybody Loves Somebodypaired o¹ with Abstract Logic, Tough Lovewith

                        Possibilities in Geometric Abstraction, Fill of Beautyand Equal Minds. Emotion and
                        intellect, heart and head, twine around each other like the strands of a double  [1 ]
                        helix. So, too, with Sturgis’s art.



                        Take Shine on me, a new work in this exhibition. A quick glance will tell you 
                        that it is two things, an abstract painting and a painting about abstract pain -
                        ting. If it looks like a Bridget Riley, then that is not by acci dent. One of the
                        demands Sturgis’s picture makes of the viewer is an answer to the question 

                        of how it is likely to be seen historically—whether it is possible, in the 21st
                        century, to paint a canvas with bands of black-and-white checkerboard
                        squares with out somebody, some where saying, ‘It looks like a Bridget Riley’.
                        Beyond that again is the broader ques tion of whether there is anylode 

                        of abstract painting that has not already been mined, and in what ways 
                        that might matter.
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