Moyna Flannigan
Stare
29 May – 2 November 2014
Gallery 3

Moyna Flannigan paints images of fictional characters who reflect the mood of our time. Her paintings and works on paper cast a critical and often humorous eye on the effects of power on personal, cultural and political identity. Although they have their roots in Flannigan’s keen observation of the world around her, her figures have increasingly developed a more mythical quality. Their failings, incongruities or follies are our own, only more spectacular and more compelling.

She develops her paintings slowly, working on more than one painting at a time. Light and space are created through successive layers of contrasting colours. the image forms after many changes, additions and subtractions. She does not work from photographs or models but builds an image from a multitude of sources, which are passed through the filter of her memory and vivid imagination. Her recent paintings of women present the female figure on a monumental scale, challenging the stereotype of female representation in painting.

For GENERATION Flannigan has created a new body of work for this exhibition, entitled Stare. She draws on the story of Adam and Eve to reflect and underlying conflict between individualism and conformity. Her series of drawings The First People were inspired by sources as wide-ranging as Massaccio’s Expulsion from the Garden of Eden (1425) in the Brancacci Chapel, Florence, and John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s 1969 Bed-in. The paintings focus on the archetypal figure of Eve, and original model, which she reinvents for our times. Parallels can be drawn with current events but Flannigan’s painted reality is created from the uncertainty of dream, memory and experience.

Moyna Flannigan (born 1963 in Scotland) completed her BA at Edinburgh College of Art in 1985. In 1987 she received an MFA from Yale University School of Art. Her work is represented in many international public and private collections. She currently lives and works in the Edinburgh area.