Paul Winstanley, UK

Paul Winstanley (b. 1954, Manchester, UK) is best known for his meticulously observed paintings made from photographs, works that draw unexpected beauty from the everyday with quiet, tactile precision.

Educated at Cardiff College of Art (1973–76) and the Slade School of Fine Art (1976–78), Winstanley was initially schooled in the orthodoxies of abstract Modernism. Over the following decade, he developed a distinct visual language that fused minimalist restraint with the pictorial possibilities of photography. Winstanley’s work continues to examine how we occupy and observe the spaces around us, transforming the seemingly ordinary into sites of quiet intensity and reflection.

The painting leans into the series of paintings called ‘Veil,’ of shrouded windows with obscured landscapes beyond, that Winstanley did some years ago. However in this case the image comes from a visit in 2014 to the former East German security services H.Q known as STASI, a place from which the state organised the repression and control of the population during the communist era. Winstanley was in East Berlin briefly in the late 1980’s, before the Berlin Wall came down, and can remember it well. We currently live in times when some of the same political instincts are re-emerging, though the methods of control and repression are somewhat different. Winstanley was struck by how ordinary, almost domestic, the STASI interior is and recorded this view of the window there as an example of that. It seemed prescient to make the painting at this time.