George Morton-Clark, It's Friday All Week

Opera Gallery Madrid is pleased to present “It's Friday All Week”, the first solo exhibition in Spain by the British artist George Morton-Clark, showcasing his most recent work.

When we first glance at the artist’s canvases, we are greeted by a familiar imaginary of animated cartoon characters, he appropriates with spirited resourcefulness and underscores with marked monumentality and chromatic vividness. He intervenes on his canvases with assertive brushwork, driven by a gesture that instils an exhilaratingly intense rhythm.

With his ability to reinterpret cartoon characters from his childhood, Morton-Clark invites us on an introspective journey that couples the familiar and the abstract to create a unique visual dialogue. This focus not only denotes a stylistic choice, but is in fact the medium to explore our emotional relationship with these characters. By rendering them in canvas paintings, the artist divests these icons of their childlike innocence and submerges us into a new narrative in which nostalgia is inflected with the complexity of the adult experience.

Morton-Clark forces us to question the images that shape our imaginary and our relationship with it. We are indeed constantly surrounded by images, immersed in a reality that has been filtered through television, the medium that decisively influenced a collective imaginary with characters such as Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck or the Pink Panther. By bringing these animated cartoon characters on his canvases, Morton-Clark manages to crack a smile on the face of adults who recognise the source and appreciate the novel quality the image accrues in this context.

Therefore, the artistic appropriation in “It’s Friday All Week” becomes a powerful instrument to explore the influence of popular culture in our collective psyche, activated by iconic cartoon characters with the purpose of conjuring shared memories. In this way, Morton-Clark manages to kindle an experience that functions not only in Western settings, but has shown itself to be universal, as borne out in his recent shows in Singapore and South Korea.