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My work takes as a starting point my own life, such as my close friends, the people that I love, my family, my colleagues; it can also be as simple as looking at people on the train or the expression on the face of an ice- cream seller at the weekend. It references a personal sense of place, my British upbringing with the fields and the racecourses, the pubs where I would play darts with colleagues after work, as well as London and Berlin where I have spent most of my adult life working in warehouses, building sites and for art galleries. But through making, I allow the image to shift. It becomes interwoven with elements of collected photography, of filmic and stock imagery and of historic painting (particularly Christian imagery). I allow for invented characters to become part of the scene, for the environment to evolve through memory, stories and projection, for the fabric of the image to become something other, with its own sense of time and place. This mixing of elements of reality with things that are fictitious or artificial is my way of thinking about how something is created and conveyed as being in one sense whole, but also as being more than the sum of its parts. Like a Cronenberg film, or Kafka story, I recognise that there are taxonomies that operate between the skin of the image or object and the depth of its mood or content, but that they are always there within the scene or story that is depicted.
Suitor (2021)
51 x 41cm
Watercolour on paper
Rory Biddulph is a visual artist born in Britain and based in Berlin, Germany. He gained his BA from Newcastle University (2006-2010) and his MA from the Slade School of Fine Art (2013-2015). Recent exhibitions include the John Moores Painting Prize 2020 at the Walker Art Museum (2021) and The Ruth Borchard Self Portrait Prize (2021) at Coventry Cathedral. Previous exhibition highlights include the Adrian Carruthers Award (2015), The Clifford Chance Purchase Prize (2016 ) and the XL Catlin Art Prize (2016). Rory Biddulph is also the co-founder of s-l-i-c-e, a curatorial partnership which runs an exhibition programme out of Ufer Studios, Berlin.
Follow me: @rorybiddulph
To find out more about s-l-i-c-e and the upcoming program please visit:
@slice.berlin
Follow s-l-i-c-e: @slice.berlin