Maureen Paley is pleased to represent Merlin James and to announce his first solo exhibition at the gallery and Studio M.
His practice, which includes curating and art-critical writing as well as painting, has developed a deep aesthetic understanding over some four decades. This show will combine recently finished paintings with ones selected from his studio inventory in Glasgow, the earliest dating to 1982.
“I am actually working with temporality. I’m using the way work gets old, or changes over time, physically and in terms of its readings. I’m interested in how paintings time travel.”1
The exhibition will include paintings of the Arnold Circus bandstand, an east London landmark visible from the Studio M window. He first painted and drew the bandstand in the mid 1980s when he had a studio nearby on Redchurch Street, and he has recently returned to the motif. It is one of a range of such architectural structures—including bridges, piers, toll booths, windmills—which have recurred throughout his work:
“I’m painting about grouping and division [ . . . ] about boundaries and enclosures, boxes and compartments.”2
at Maureen Paley and Studio M, London
until January 11, 2025