IM ART is pleased to announce the first solo exhibition of James Rielly. It will run from the 28th of Oct through the 5th of Dec 2009. He was born in Wales in 1956 and having previously lived in Belfast, Berlin and London, he now lives and works near Toulouse, France.

In 2006, he was appointed Professor of Painting at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris, France. Rielly’s work is held in a number of prestigious public collections including the Tate Gallery, UK; the Arts Council of England; the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nantes, France; CASA Salamanca, Spain and the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, UK. Recent solo exhibitions with Galeria Ramis Barquet, New York, Galeria Distrito Qu4tro, Madrid and Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris have gained him a renewed attention.

Part of the ‘YBA’ generation, his work was included in the acclaimed Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection, Royal Academy, London; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; Brooklyn Museum, New York, 1997-2000. Drawing inspiration from ‘found images’ and newspaper headlines of the everyday, Rielly de-contextualizes his protagonists creating deliberately ambiguous and often bizarre scenes rendered in oil and watercolor. He uses photographs from the tabloids, magazines and forensic books as the starting point for his disturbing paintings, removing the context of the image so that what may have once seemed acceptable now becomes bizarre and surreal. A restrained color palettes, experimental and tentative lines, and heavy strokes reflect an unexplainable uneasiness in his work.

Subject matters that appear frequently in his work, contrasting against each other, such as adults and children, cover various areas ranging from the usual portraits, middle-class administrator and family album. Furthermore, his twisted depiction of an adult as a child, and child as an adult signifies definition of general roles of our society as family member, student, officer, and etc. Also he disquiets stillness by overturning presenting images. These black humors leave audiences with English non-sense and its lingering traces.

Rielly does not offer the viewer a simple reading of his work. He leads audiences to have their own experiences and emotional tie and social, relational and structural ironies from their memories. Finally audiences are asked to make their own narratives. Presenting Rielly’s 19 works including his drawings and oils with I M ART, audiences will experience the subtle gap between what we believe that we see and what we know.