Anthony Banks
Gone to Seed

For Anthony Banks’ third solo exhibition at the gallery, ruins slowly ruin, birds migrate and return, wildflowers bloom and go to seed. There is a feeling of seasons passing, one time of year concluding to bring the possibilities of the next. Transforming the gallery into an artist’s atelier, Banks presents a series of completed works alongside those still in progress – offering a rare glimpse into a process usually hidden behind studio doors. Speaking of renewal, failure and desire, the exhibition is a reflection on the undulations of time, as moments – perfect or otherwise – come and go like a flower gone to seed. As the artist often spends over ten years completing a work – revisiting, repainting, reinterpreting – the exhibition straddles the new, old and still in progress to ask of us one simple, yet increasingly difficult task: patience.

The paintings… on display in Banks’s exhibition are the product of long spells during which he has sequestered himself in his studio, a site of germination, where new shoots nudge slowly towards the light. The Biblical book of Ecclesiastes observes that ‘To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under Heaven’. For the artist, there is a time to paint, and a time to show, but the former season lasts much longer than the latter. He labours on each of his works over several years, sometimes setting them aside for long periods, like a fallow field, so that they — and he — might age, change, regenerate. His is an art that is born of the interplay between slowness (the layering of strata upon strata of paint) and speed (figuration being locked in quickly, and the rapid application of pigment to the support). Significantly, even when his canvases move from the studio to the gallery wall, he does not think of them as finished, but rather as ‘paused’.

— excerpt from Tom Morton’s exhibition catalogue essay