Ivan Seal was born in 1973 in Stockport near Manchester. He lives and works in Berlin.
Always painting from his mind, never from an object or image, Ivan Seal sets the to work the imagination’s triumvirate of improvisation, invention and memory producing paintings at once flat and three-dimensional, realistic and yet like nothing ever seen before.
Set up in the style of still lives on pedestals, or on an indefinite but realistic ground, represented objects often appear unfinished, conveying a sense of ‘in the making’, while single strokes of paint float free from representation. Such memories also continually shift in balance or tension between the worlds of his father, who was a butcher, and his mother, a ballet dancer.
It’s an iconography the artist has evolved over time in which paint slips disconcertingly from tool to subject matter, becoming embodiments of psychological reckoning; a physical expression of the gunk of memory through which each of us fashion our worlds. Paint is many things in his work; but it is also just paint, laid on a canvas, as bold, dumb and brilliant as that permits.