The Missing Act

In Derby with half an hour to kill, I stepped into the city museum and art gallery, home to the country's finest collection of works by Joseph Wright. But before I could visit the Wrights, my attention was caught by a temporary exhibition, The Missing Act, of paintings by a young artist called Max Gimson, of whom I had never heard, but who is the latest winner of the Jonathan Vickers Fine Art Award. I had no idea what to expect – and I was in for a pleasant surprise. The Missing Act is an exhibition of paintings inspired by the now derelict Derby Hippodrome, drawing on its archive of programmes, production stills and publicity photographs. The image above, for example, is of Bela Lugosi relaxing backstage between performances (as Dracula, hence the trickle of stage blood). It put me in mind – as did many of the pictures in the exhibition – of Walter Sickert's theatrical scenes, though Gimson's palette is brighter than Sickert's, more like Harold Gilman's, and his drawing is generally broader, not to say cruder. There are even faint echoes of early Hockney and of Kitaj. Gimson's approach is essentially figurative, but he likes to mix things up, playing with scale, with foreground and background, and often leaving you wondering quite what it is you're looking at. He sees his pictures less as representations than as 'sets of relationships between space, colour, texture and form' (of all of which there is plenty). When painting, he likes to achieve a state where 'thought and intention go out of the window', accidents and mistakes happen, the work in progress achieves a kind of autonomy, and in the end the finished painting somehow comes into being: this is what the title 'The Missing Act' refers to. 
  Some of the pictures on display are more successful than others, but almost all of them gave me a real thrill of aesthetic pleasure – and what more can you ask? Here is one of the more straightforward pictures – 'Romance' –

And here is something harder to read – 'Marie Lloyd Between Dandelions' – 

Gimson says his paintings are 'intended to evoke the atmosphere of a location' (in this case, the Derby Hippodrome), and this they certainly do. But, more than that, they evoke a time – the lost age of the variety theatre – and they do it far more effectively than photographs could, creating something strange and rather beautiful from the source material. I'm very glad I happened upon this hugely enjoyable exhibition. If you find yourself in Derby, do go and have a look...