Graham Gingles
The History Man Explains
Oil on canvas
H 107 cm x W 130 cm / H 42.13 in x W 51.18 in
This artwork is Unique
Certificate of Authenticity included
Every artwork travels protected with the same care with which it was chosen.
Graham Gingles (b. 1943, Larne, Co. Antrim) began his career as a painter before turning, in 1969, to the intimate boxed constructions for which he later became best known internationally. He trained at the Belfast College of Art, Hornsey College of Art and the British School at Rome, and has continued to paint and draw throughout his career alongside his sculptural practice, work described as technically accomplished and just as strange as his boxes. His work is held in major public collections, including the Irish Museum of Modern Art and the Ulster Museum, and he was appointed an Academician of the Royal Ulster Academy in 1986.
Executed in oil on canvas, The History Man Explains stands apart from Gingles’ better-known boxed constructions, though it shares their appetite for literary titling and coded personal narrative. The phrase recalls Malcolm Bradbury’s satirical 1975 novel The History Man, whose manipulative, ideologically driven protagonist made the term a byword for a certain kind of confident, self-serving explainer. Whether or not the reference is intended directly, the title’s dry irony is entirely consistent with Gingles’ habit of undercutting authority and certainty, here rendered not within a glazed box but across the open surface of a large-scale canvas.
To collect The History Man Explains is to acquire a rarer element of Gingles’ output: a large-scale painting rather than one of his celebrated boxed constructions, offering the same wry, literate sensibility on a public, gallery-ready scale. It is a piece from a practice held in the same institutional company as the Irish Museum of Modern Art and the Ulster Museum, by an artist equally accomplished in paint as in three dimensions.
WhatsApp
Email
WeChat
