Wild Life: Alan Stanners

Brooke Benington is pleased to present Wild Life, a solo exhibition by Alan Stanners. Stanners presents a collection of paintings and drawings which explore the intersection of portraiture and abstraction, using hyper-realistic renderings of fictional subjects to engage viewers with narratives about our evolving relationship with the environment, cultural mythology, and technology. The works capture the extraordinary and unsettling elements within the mundane aspects of everyday life.

In Wild Life, flat primary hues and shifting tones create dislocated contexts for the figures, transforming the canvas into a performative space where the drama unfolds. Recognisable and anomalous objects, rendered with precision or left silhouetted, evoke abandonment and anticipation. The interplay of scale and the rigidity of the canvas frame distort artistic intention, signalling potential unease. Minimalist grid-based painting influences are evident in the simple divisions of figure and ground, imposing restrictive boundaries on the depicted bodies.