Philip Lumai
Three Paintings to Think With
9 December 2021 to 13 March 2021
Philip Lumai Three Paintings to Think With 9 December 2021 to 5 February 2022
V/MSP Gallery is delighted to present the gallery’s first solo show with the British abstract painter Philip Lumai. Born in Bristol in 1968, he studied at Falmouth in Cornwall and later in Liverpool, subsequently living and working quite nomadically in France, Germany, the U.K and Belgium. Both intellectual and individualistic his paintings attest to an uncompromising commitment to the advancement of painting in it’s most fundamental terms of colour and form. His monochrome paintings on aluminium from the early 2000’s became well known amongst collectors and artists in London, and Berlin and were also shown in Brussels at the Galerie Ledune.
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Expressing a risky disregard for safe stylistic continuity, Philip Lumai is currently working simultaneously on 5 distinct and ongoing series of paintings, progressively reorientating historical perspectives using idiosyncratic ideas or ‘generative concepts’ that are reflected in the titles of his works. Without doubt, a colour painter who is inspired by the legacy of the great modernist masters, he is interested equally in the generation of abstract form and draws upon his studies of western philosophy to express the capacity of painting as a vital and critical experience of thinking today. For this show he presents three paintings, each distinct and independent from each other but in another sense unmistakably belonging to the same project, and articulated by the same hand. ​
‘Faced with a painting we tend to either think about it or just look at it, but both of those options separate us from the work in front of us. I’m proposing that we think with it and this proposition may well seem devoid of sense if we have forgotten that painting itself can be a mode of thought and that thought - in its philosophical form at least - relies upon a certain choreography of concepts and a precision of vocabulary that is not unlike the interactions and distributions of emerging forms and colours.’