Bio

 

 

 

Born 1971 in the UK, James Aldridge studied at the Royal College of Art, London and now lives and works in Sweden. He currently has work at Tate Modern, London, 7th floor restaurant commission. He has received awards including Chapter Residency and Solo Exhibition and the Rome Scholarship in Fine Art. He has recently had solo shows in London and Amsterdam and exhibited in Venice, Rome, Frankfurt.  Forthcoming shows in Copenhagen, Madrid and New York are scheduled.

 

Aldridge's work reflects his immediate environment, the forests of Småland in Southern Sweden. Much of the music he listens to is also Scandinavian, which contains traces of a Nordic melancholy tapped from the same source as Ibsen, Munch, Strindberg.

 

Aldridge finds parallels between the paintings he makes and the music he listens to. They are not illustrations of the music, rather they inhabit the same world as the music. The genres of music he listens to - Black Metal, Doom, True Doom, Death Doom, Funeral Doom, Black Doom, Thrash, Sludge, Drone, Noise, Folk Metal, etc. embrace imagery that deals with good and evil, elemental forces, folklore and the beauty and strength of nature (it is revered) and couple it with the physical force of the music as an entity to create powerful atmosphere. It isn't so much about story telling or straightforward narratives. In his studio this near constant aural background, coupled with the physical presence of the vast, dark forest, leave their trace on the paintings, as with the music they do not create straightforward narratives but build atmospheres and moods.

 

Crows and skulls, a constant feature of his work, are historically images that have held potent symbolic meanings. Unable to shake off these connotations it is as though the actual objects have become obfuscated by their symbolic charge. It is this contradiction that interests Aldridge and he allows them to become players contained in the world that he constructs. Appearing to feed off and generate each other simultaneously they are often involved in revolting and bizarre interactions.

 

The belief that these characters can inhabit this constructed world is crucial to Aldridge and each image has its own, potent atmosphere that appears ever darker.