Alan Charlton Biography
Alan Charlton is a British artist born in Sheffield in 1948, he studied at the Royal Academy in London. Charlton claimed to be an artist who paints gray paintings. In 1968, during the annual exhibition of the academy's students, he created his first gray painting which was rejected and was not presented as part of the exhibition. This experience, rather than distracting him from his expressive language, encourages him to continue coherently on the path undertaken. In 1972 his first exhibition at the Konrad Fischer gallery in Düsseldorf where he exhibited only gray paintings, making a radical choice in favor of this chromatic component. The entire system of painting is reduced to monochrome and the entire linguistic repertoire limited to a uniform and compact. The artist makes a conscious choice in favor of an absolute impersonality of language through a radical elimination of every expressive component. His work is based on the concepts of space, silence and waiting, and interacts with the surrounding environment without ever transcending it.
Alan Charlton's art vibrates in the intensity of the rhythm and the beats, it lives in the exchange and dialectical relationship he establishes with the environment and the surrounding space. The works in the collection belong to different historical periods, and clearly define the intellectual coherence that distinguishes this artist who has always been intent on creating a gray picture in continuous metamorphosis, in evolution. In Single Panel Painting, 1977, the structure and internal logic of the painting is reflected in Charlton's predilection for elementary modules and basic compositions (the square, the rectangle). Multiple Line Painting, 1984, consists of eighteen horizontal panels arranged equidistant five centimeters from each other. Through the serial repetition of the same identical module, the painting interacts with the supporting wall and marks its spatiality, establishing a dialectical relationship with the surrounding environment. In more recent years the artist experiments with the combination of different shades of color within a single work as demonstrated by Five Vertical Parts (Two Greys).
