Dexter Dalwood - Contemporary Artists

Grosvenor Square

Grosvenor Square The Saatchi Gallery
 

Dexter Dalwood

Grosvenor Square

2002
Oil on Canvas

268 x 347cm

Dexter Dalwood paints London’s swish Grosvenor Square, home to the American embassy, as a comic Armageddon. The sculpture of a dead president stands in ominous glory, a lone caped panto-villain master-minding the elements of world power. Dexter Dalwood pictures this landmark circa 1969: the upside-down trees are taken from a Georg Baselitz painting from this period. Painted during the Iraq war, Dalwood envisions the park as a place of protest, citing the anti-Vietnam demonstrations that took place there. In this epic work Dexter Dalwood captures the enormity of historical resonance: the leaf-strewn grass is weighted with pastoral calmness, giving a grounded continuity of order to the lingering aura of violence.
 
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