George Shaw
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The real subject of Shaw's paintings is the weight of memory. Working meticulously in model-makers enamel, Shaw paints from his snapshots of the places of his childhood on a council estate near Coventry in the post-industrial Midlands. Always empty of people, Shaw's minutely detailed landscapes trace the artist's determination to reconstruct not just the look, but the emotional charge of his memories. A far cry from a British landscape tradition in painting, this work does not glorify a rural idyll; instead it draws the viewer into the unremarkable, melancholy spaces between suburb and countryside - a geography familiar to adolescents wandering around the margins of their neighbourhood.