Paul Winstanley
Bringing It All Back Home
14 February – 18 April 2026
‘There was nothing premeditated or planned about this group of paintings. It grew naturally from an initial idea to make a painting to live with at home. In 2021, I had painted an image of tulips in a vase in my kitchen and this had been bought by a friend who had it in her house, where I saw it each time I went round. I thought that I would quite like a similar painting in my own house (I hardly have anything of my own at home). I had taken a photograph of mimosa in my kitchen several months earlier and this became the basis for a painting that I called Kitchen Flowers. But instead of bringing it home, I kept it in the studio to look at. Slowly, I thought a second variation might be interesting, a bit smaller, narrower, but softer and less focused. So the initial painting became Kitchen Flowers 1 and this new version, Kitchen Flowers 2.
Then I remembered a photograph that I had taken of an orchid on a glass table in the back room of a gallery on Cork Street a year or two earlier. The painting that I did from this image became Gallery Flowers. But yet again the idea of a variation occurred, using slightly different colour and a longer shape that I had adopted for another group of paintings, in the proportion 13:9. So now I had Gallery Flowers 1 and Gallery Flowers 2. I had been photographing flowers informally for some time as I came across them at friends’ houses or in churches, galleries, or lobbies. The image that I adopted for At Jane’s House was one such, Jane being the friend who owned the original flower painting from 2021, and in the top corner of this image can be seen the bottom corner of that original painting. Thus it is a somewhat self-referential painting of a still-life with tulips, with my original painting of tulips intruding obliquely. Only at that point did it occur to me that this was developing into a group of paintings. I began talking about them to Anthony Wilkinson, who also became interested in showing them in his Soho gallery, a setting that I considered a perfect match for the paintings.
With the exception of Kitchen Flowers 1, all the paintings are 2025, although they derive from various images taken over the past twelve years. They are all on panel, which I have grown to love painting on. They eschew the ameliorating softness of paint on canvas and can achieve a quite unique intensity of surface. The qualities that make them mine – the mood, the light, the colour, the focused observation, the surfaces – are all things that happen because I choose one thing and not another, many hundreds, even thousands of times in the course of developing and making a painting. There is an imperative to these choices and it is cumulative. Will one of these paintings come home? I am considering another image now that may or may not make it back from the studio’
Text © Paul Winstanley 2025