In 2010 Clive Head mesmerised crowds at the National Gallery, drawing over 16,000 people in two weeks, breaking the gallery’s record for visitors to a contemporary exhibition. This autumn, Waterhouse & Dodd will display paintings and drawings by the artist showing his development in recent years – his first solo exhibition in London since 2012.

Clive Head is a British contemporary artist who rose to prominence in 2005 when he was commissioned by the Museum of London to paint Buckingham Palace in celebration of the Queen’s Golden Jubilee. Since then, he has displayed alongside Canaletto in the National Gallery, Nicolas Poussin in the Dulwich Picture Gallery, and has exhibited in the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, and the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid. Over his career, he has been represented by the Louis K. Meisel Gallery, Blains Fine Art, Marlborough Fine Art and Landau Fine Art. Throughout his artistic development, Clive Head has been known for enrapturing his audiences with his perceptive and hypnotic depictions of urban life.

Head’s work is concerned with expressing his reality – a culmination of observation, lived experience, fears and fantasies, achieved by the re-interpretation of conventional perspective and his subject. His work over the last 10 years demonstrates an evolving practice, continually seeking resolution to the idea of encapsulating reality as it is experienced. This pursuit experience took him from subtly distorted urban landscapes, to compositions layered with multiple time-frames and perspectives. It is with these paintings of ‘colliding time-frames’, as he describes, that our survey begins.

In more years he has sought a more intuitive approach to painting, allowing rhythm to permeate the labyrinthine web of images forming his compositions. He allows himself to be led by instinct in application of both colour and brushstroke. As we study the paintings, swans, elephants and other animals emerge from his canvases in bisecting lines and over-riding contours; these forms are testament to the level of improvisation Head has developed in his practice, as they are integrated only as and when they occur to him whilst painting.

From London’s tube stations and cafes, to quiet suburban recesses and train journeys across the journey, Head’s work reinterprets familiar sights and experiences. Waterhouse & Dodd are delighted to represent an artist of Clive’s international calibre.