This is your last chance to see Birmingham-based painter Graham Chorlton first solo exhibition at a commercial gallery in London. Closing this Saturday (3rd October) the show is curated by Fused magazine contributor Matt Price at the Master Piper gallery which opened in spring of this year next door to the Imperial War Museum in Lambeth North, and following the lead of other fashionable London galleries such as The Approach, is situated above a fine pub.

The exhibition, Hotel Minerva, features 14 recent and new works by one of the West Midlands’ most accomplished painters – Chorlton won the prize for painting at the Birmingham Open at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery in 2007, as well as first prize at the Leamington Gallery Open later that year.

Some of the works included in the new exhibition are from a series of paintings of the Bristol Road that were first exhibited at the University of Birmingham in 2008. Other works are of buildings and urban landscapes from much further afield, whether a bleak hotel in Lugano, Switzerland, the exterior of a casino in Monte Carlo, or a 1960s shopping centre somewhere in Sweden. The paintings are lonely, melancholy depictions of architecture, civil engineering, interiors and street scenes, often depicted at night and usually without human presence, but never without humanity and an air of excitement and mystery.

Master Piper
Above The Three Stags Pub
67—69 Kennington Road
London
SE1 7PZ
Wed—Fri 12—6pm
Sat—Sun by appointment

Image Credit: Hotel Minerva, 2007. Oil and acrylic on canvas 63.5 x 76.2 cm. Courtesy the artist and Master Piper, London.
Photo: Stuart Whipps.