Jo McGonigal: Shift, Patricia Fleming Projects, Studio 225, South Block, Osborne Street, Glasgow, until October 22.
www.patriciaflemingprojects.co.uk
THIS review comes with a warning. Jo McGonigal is a painter. But not as you know it.
With one eye on the old Masters and another on the vexed question of "what is painting", Manchester-based McGonigal deconstructs paintings and reassembles them to make oddly beautiful sculptural works.
A small exhibition featuring six of McGonigal's artworks can be seen for another week at Patricia Fleming's tiny studio gallery in the South Block suite of studios in Glasgow's Merchant City.
Fleming explains: "By taking painting apart and focusing on its physical components, Jo examines how the material components of painting affect the experience of the viewer, not what the painting means but what it does."
All McGonigal's works start as paintings. With four sides and everything. There's a couple of examples outside Fleming's studio. She then "unpacks" them.
One work called Along takes the art – literally – out of the gallery and over the street to the Glasgow Print Studio workshop via a yellow bungee cord. It's oddly affecting. It makes you think of the connection which artists and art make in their work. McGonigal cites Poussin and other Baroque painters as influences. You catch hints of this in the lines and angles of a deconstructed frame and the purity of the vivid yellow pigment in several of her works. I can hear the Turner Prize naysayers grumble already, but it made me think and I like that in my art.
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