For David Hepher, the dialogue between the ‘distance’ of the photographic image and the physical tactility of paint and brushstroke is crucial to the presence of his work. As an artist, he obsessively exploits the interplay between representation and realisation. By incorporating the real materials of architecture into his paintings, he seeks not merely to represent the tower blocks of South East London, but to take over their very substance. The temptation to read the picture plane, with its lucid geometry and fidelity to the line, as an exercise in abstraction, dissolves at the moment the painting’s swarming detail comes into focus. The subtle disorder within order that is the essence of Hepher’s paintings is perpetually at work to reveal the hidden lives behind the concrete screens.
David Hepher CV