Artist Steve des Landes has been working for the last two and half years from his Birkenhead studio to prepare for his forthcoming solo exhibition in the heart of London’s Mayfair, opening in October 2020.
His major exhibition at the Williamson Art Gallery & Museum in Birkenhead in January 2018 brought him to the attention of David Messum, founder and chairman of Messum’s.
“Steve des Landes fits well into our interest in exceptional British figurative artists” comments David Messum. “His work has a new story to tell and is right for this moment as we all question how we live and what we are doing to our planet. des Landes’ paintings have a medieval quality, a narrative that speaks of human conditions reflecting his own inner experiences. Concern for lives as yet unfulfilled, they illustrate everyday experience.”
Steven des Landes paints people and landscapes filled with angst, uncertainty, anguish and hope; he reveals romance and disappointment; opportunity and failure; fear and fable.
His people seem to be preoccupied; life seems to be elsewhere. He is – as his work boldly attests – an artist with an extraordinary personal vision. At a time when painting is once again re-establishing its importance, he is a new force to be reckoned with.
If his artwork was to be placed him in an artistic style, it would be alongside Glasgow School artists such as Stephen Campbell, Ken Currie and Peter Howson – gritty urban realists painting the anxieties of modernity.
‘For me, a painting begins with fear,’ des Landes observes. The image is already inside his head – the vision of what it will be. The fear is in wondering whether he will succeed in expressing that vision.
He has ‘a traffic jam’ of visions and ideas in his head right now, each work leading inexorably on to a new one. Beautiful, disturbing, perplexing, romantic, torn – in turn they are all these things.
His work will be on display in Messums’ from the 7th – 30th of October 2020 and his award winning piece “Sisters” from Williamson Open 2015 is part of the collection owned by Wirral Council in the Williamson Art Gallery.
See the Messums website here.