Matthew Radford

The Alan Cristea Gallery will be exhibiting a new series of editioned etchings and an accompanying suite of monoprints by the British painter and printmaker, Matthew Radford.

Although Radford is very conscious that the contemporary visitor to an art gallery is, for the most part, unwilling to read something that is not an instantaneous image, he has persisted with his vision of humanity in general, and the city experience in particular, as seen through the blurred and dehumanised vehicle of the surveillance camera. He is more concerned with the spiritual experience of the human beings who people his crowd scenes than with the accurate depiction of individuals.

These eighteen new prints reflect this view and the challenge for him was to find a method of making prints which retained the balance between the surface activity of the paintings' foregrounds and his repertoire of subjects in the backgrounds. A dual approach was required and for the project he chose the combination of photographic and etching plates.

Radford's work is held by many major public and private collections including the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and the Yale Centre for British Art.