Info
For the latest updates, images of work in progress, installation mages of exhibitions and other contextual information, please visit Instagram: @edwinaitkenart
Statement
In Edwin Aitken’s paintings, images based upon anatomy and the natural world are generated via an expressive and intuitive approach to mark making and a subjective interpretation of the landscape.
Distanced from the desire to present an immediately recognisable view of a specific, exterior location or place, the paintings move closer to a condition that is more representative of an interior, metaphysical territory where imagination and improvisation have a great deal of autonomy and importance. The images in these paintings - and the visual and emotive connections they have to the landscape are held in a fluid state - poised between a sense of resolution and disintegration that conflates the prosaic with something more mysterious and coded.
Exhibitions and events
Recent exhibitions include: ‘It Rose and It Fell’ Terrace Gallery, London, ‘Summer Exhibition 2024’ Royal Academy of Arts, London, ‘Summer Exhibition’ The Minories, Colchester, ‘Fronteer Open’, Fronteer Gallery, Sheffield, ‘Wales Contemporary’, Waterfront Gallery, Milford Haven, ‘Three Movements of a Longer Work’ Prosaic Projects Gallery, Sheffield, ‘Contrafibularities’, Fronteer Gallery, Sheffield, ‘From the Dark Soil’, Blyth Gallery, Imperial College, London, ‘Think Of Me With Kindness’, Gage Gallery, Sheffield, ‘Tooth and Claw’, Birdbox, Cambridge, ‘The Smell of Wild Roses’, Prosaic Projects, Sheffield, ‘Silent Disco’ Greystone Industries, Suffolk, ‘Flirting with the Border Guards’ Terrace, London, ‘your FOOT in my FACE and other tectonic strategies’ Kingsgate Project Space, London, ‘Without Borders’ Elysium Gallery, Swansea, ‘Prosaic Mosaic’ Bloc Projects, Sheffield, ‘Archipelago’, Walthamstow Wetlands, London, ‘Flat + Earth’ Sidney + Matilda, Sheffield, ‘WAC Awards’ Wells UK (2018 & 2020) and ‘Silent Green’ King's College, Cambridge.
Biography
Born in Manchester, Edwin Aitken studied Painting at the Royal College of Art MA (RCA) and Fine Art Painting at Loughborough College of Art and Design BA (Hons).
His work is held in private collections in England and the USA. It has been included in exhibitions in the UK and abroad as well as the BEEP Painting Prize in 2012, 2020 and 2022, the Jackson’s Painting Prize 2021 and he was also longlisted for the Contemporary British Painting Prize in 2021. Upon his graduation from the Royal College of Art he was awarded the Susan Summers Studio Fellowship USA. He currently lives and works in London.