Generate/ Alternate News from the School of Art, Architecture and Design

A new exhibition by Cass Fine Art lecturer Michael Stubbs.

Michael Stubbs, who teaches painting on the BA Fine Art course at The Cass, is exhibiting with artist John Bunker at Unit 3 Projects in east London.

Michael Stubbs and John Bunker are abstract artists working with found mass/new media imagery. Stubbs has a growing interest in the interface between painting and the burgeoning digital realm of images, clip art and texts, while Bunker produces works using paint, print media, advertising and other urban detritus gleaned from city streets. Both of them combine self-reflexive criticality, visual flare and adventurous experimentation with a strong interest in the contested histories of modernism. 

Many abstract artists work within the tradition of painting as a self-generating process of discovery through making. But crucially, like an alternating current that periodically changes direction, Stubbs and Bunker also put their process-driven approaches into reverse. They look outside the studio to the world and feed the competing and ubiquitous visual noise that dominates modern experience back into their work.

Both artists employ the languages of layering and cutting found in the history of collage. But in very different ways, they use abstraction's freedom of invention and the sensuous plasticity peculiar to paint and painting. The results are, by turns, highly seductive yet brutal, layered and complex yet immediately arresting.