LARRY McGINITY
PRESS RELEASE

Larry McGinity
The Financial Crisis Show: Art as a Derivative
January 6^th- February 1st 2014

Hay Hill Gallery’s 2014 exhibition schedule is set to open with Larry McGinity’s hotly anticipated project ‘The Financial Crisis Show: Art as a Derivative’. On show from the 6^th January-1^st February, the work weaves together a dramatic historical discourse with beautifully structured bands of colour. McGinity’s show is a theatrical demonstration of complex financial networks; his bright comet tails shoot past leaving us trails of information.

McGinity believes that art has a responsibility to tell a story and so he uses text as though it were another colour on the palette. The well-documented financial crisis unfolds visually through the 14 paintings of this collection. Voiced with a myriad of intersecting quotes taken from an extensive range of media, each work considers one particular aspect of the whole sorry tale. The viewer is invited to literally read between the lines where euphemisms are out of context and undermined by their own contradictions. The propaganda, manipulations and generalisations are exposed as society’s Babel-esque coping mechanism.

Offering a very human take on the situation, the darkly humorous pieces read like tragi-comedy. Attempts to interpret the past events have led to an abstracted understanding that the artist highlights within intricate colour rhythms. Nothing is black and white in these Chinese whispers. The text is laid under and over, measured out in grids that weave together a tapestry of voices interrupting each other. Reds, pinks and blues are pixelated like newsprint from the brand new headlines of the morning commute, to the free papers blackening the pavement after rush hour.

McGinity learned the alien language of the business world by immersing himself within it, editing his extensive research down from half a million words to the bare bones of 20,000. These tides of information are spread out over primed boards, every letter having been painstakingly transferred by the artist in a delicate operation. A morse code of dots and dashes remind us structurally of places we know; Wall Street is a wide white strip, the Gherkin is made up of curving diagonals. Busily intersecting lines are reminiscent of the London tube map, telephone wires, water pipes and electricity cables- the internal workings of a city.

With the benefit of hindsight, McGinity’s show gives new perspective to the developing financial turmoil, super-gluing together the hyped up house of cards. His works are cautionary tales that reveal how we got here and why these lessons still need learning.

Ends

Larry McGinity is an artist and writer on art history who was born in Tunbridge Wells in 1956. He studied Politics and Modern History at Manchester University prior to becoming an advertising salesman, which he gave up in 1985 to study Renaissance painting in Tuscany. From 1992 – 98 he held solo shows in Germany, Switzerland, New York and London. Today Larry lives and works in Hackney where he has his studio.

In 2010 he began a new series of paintings driven by a growing interest in the way economists, financial journalists and market players explained the ongoing financial crisis. He extensively researched financial media in the UK, US and Europe going back to 2007. From these assembled texts, he has created 14 thematic paintings in which some 1500 words of verbatim text relevant to each subject were employed. Each artwork focuses on a separate aspect of the financial crisis such as Subprime, HFT, Wall Street, Derivatives and City of London.

This now completed series is known as The Financial Crisis Show - Art as a Derivative.

2011 - Present Working on The Financial Crisis Show series

2007 - 2010 Art history writing commissions

2007 John Bloxham Gallery, London

1999 & 2004 Belgrave Gallery, London

1997 DFN Gallery, 648 Broadway, New York

1996 Galerie HILT, Basle, Switzerland

1994 Galerie Pichler, Augsburg, Germany
1990 John Bonham Murray Feely Gallery, London

http://www.thefinancialcrisisshow.com

Notes to Editors: Hay Hill Gallery, located on Baker Street, represents a number of internationally recognised contemporary artists. The Financial Crisis Show will be held alongside a group show and a sculpture collection which features works by Eleanor Cardozo, Richard Minns, Palolo Valdes, Andy Cheese, Ian Edwards and Nicola Godden.

For press information and images please contact Sarah Jones, sarah@hayhillgallery.com

E-mail: info@hayhillgallery.com, Fax: +44 (0) 70 5362 1735