The Waterfront

Location

Country: Belgium
City: Brussels
Place: British Embassy, UK representation to the EU & UK delegation to NATO

Chris Plowman's print juxtapose ordinary household objects against urban landscapes. In 'The Waterfront' a dressmaker’s headless dummy in a red undergarment stands incongruously on a chequer board pavement along a river bank. On the far side of the river are anonymous concrete office blocks and clouds like graffiti images on a brick wall. Plowman’s prints owe much to the spirit of Dada and Surrealist art from the 1900s to the early 1930s. In 1868 the French poet Isidore Ducasse, known by his pseudonym Comte de Lautréamont, famously described a character ‘...as beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella.’ The incongruity of Lautréamont’s images inspired Surrealist visual artists including Man Ray and René Magritte. The use of objects in Plowman’s works pays homage to Surrealist compositional devices.

Chris Plowman was born in Hampshire. He studied at the Winchester School of Art from 1969–70, and then at Wolverhampton Polytechnic (1970–73) and the Royal College of Art (1973–76). He completed several public commissions including works for the British Library, Guy's and St Thomas's Hospitals, London. Plowman had numerous solo and group exhibitions in the UK including shows at Wolverhampton Art Gallery; Royal Academy; and Flowers East, London. His works are represented in many public collections including in London, Tate, Victoria and Albert Museum and Science Museum; and at Southampton Art Gallery, Graves Art Gallery, Sheffield; and the John Hechinger Collection, Washington.

Places

England, London

Subjects

topography, townscape/cityscape

Materials & Techniques

screenprint

Artist

Chris Plowman (1952 - 2009)

Title

The Waterfront

Edition

2/35

Date

1976

Medium

Screenprint

Dimensions

height: 63.70 cm, width: 52.20 cm

Acquisition

Purchased 1990

GAC number

15626