FLOATING WORLDS

GAVIN MAUGHFLING

185 PARK ST., LONDON SE 1 9BL

October 16 - 19 2025

Private View October 16, 5 - 8

Opening Hours: Thursday and Friday 9 - 4, Saturday 10 - 4.30, Sunday 10 - 3

Sponsored by Art Academy London

The title of this exhibition is borrowed from the Japanese term Ukiyo, used to describe the pleasure-seeking pursuits and locales of Edo Japan. These paintings depict scenes of past family life and intimate domestic experiences. The image of floating refers to sensations of transience, and the evasive mirage our recollection finds in reaching for what has irretrievably gone.

It perhaps also responds to a more specific and contemporary desire, in darkening times, to float free, and to escape into a reverie of a better epoch, or to retreat into a floating world of intimacy and lovemaking. Taking the concept further, the sensation could be seen to refer to the impermanence and fluidity inherent in our experience of events while we are in them, so that figure and landscape, body and body, are all dissolved in light and sound and touch, and in spoken words and hidden thoughts.

There is a sense of loss, and an awareness amongst the protagonists that they are on the brink of the end of their familiar world, which it can be argued is  found in the woodcuts of Hokusai and Hiroshige - and this sense of impending loss is seen in hindsight, when that loss has already occurred.

Floating Worlds, Solo Exhibition

DARKNESS VISIBLE

APT Gallery

Harold Wharf, 6 Creekside, Deptford, London SE8 4SA

27 March – 13 April, Thurs – Sun, noon-5pm, Free Entry

Curators: Paula MacArthur, Gavin Maughfling and Lesley Bunch

An exhibition of painting, installation, film and performance that takes the simple idea of light emanating from darkness as a starting point to explore deeper themes of the unseen, the psyche, memory, otherness, loss, love, and the space between us.

Artists

Marius von Brasch, Lesley Bunch, Anne-Marie Creamer, Graham Crowley, Rosalind Davis & Justin Hibbs, Sam Douglas, Natalie Dowse, Pippa Gatty, Paula MacArthur, Gavin Maughfling, Donna Mclean, Ruth Murray, Joe Packer, Hideatsu Shiba, Geraldine Swayne, Judith Tucker, Casper White, Joanna Whittle.

Darkness Visible was first proposed by the late artist, lecturer and former Chair of Contemporary British Painting Judith Tucker. Exhibiting artists explore the potential of light and dark in painting, installation and film to examine wider social and philosophical concepts.

In the gallery entrance a mirrored installation by Davis & Hibbs bounces a fragmented version of us back to ourselves. This work will be activated through live performance and music at the closing event. In 2023 John Moores Painting Prize winner Graham Crowley’s work, an acid yellow light floods into the shadows of an empty workshop. Casper White, Natalie Dowse, Donna Mclean and Geraldine Swayne hold momentarily still in paint the movie and Tik Tok images we consume on illuminated screens. In Tucker’s own painting a ghostly photograph from the artist’s disrupted heritage is viewed through a diasporic lens. Anne-Marie Creamer’s film ‘Dear Friend, I Can No Longer Hear Your Voice’, commissioned by the Sir John Soane Museum, narrating the haunting, shadowed presence of a lost love, will have a dedicated showing followed by an artist Q & A. 

Events:

27 March 6-8pm: Private View

5 April 2-4pm: ‘On Shadows’, a public workshop led by Lesley Bunch exploring psychology, myth and aesthetics of shadows. Free entry. Bookings required, tickets available through Eventbrite.

9 April 6-8pm: Screening of Ann-Marie Creamer’s film ‘Dear Friend I Can No Longer Hear Your Voice’

13 April 2-4pm: Finissage with performance by movement artist Jamal Sterrett and composer for modular synths Ben Lancaster in response to the installation of Rosalind Davis & Justin Hibbs.

info@aptstudios.org  / www.aptstudios.org /  @aptstudiosgallery

Darkness Visible, APT Gallery London March 27 - April 13 2025

THIS BE THY HOUR. DANCE ART COLLABORATION WITH STEPHEN PELTON DANCE THEATER

In October 2024 the annual O+ Festival in Kingston New York hosted a collaboration with Gavin Maughfling and London-based American choreographer Stephen Pelton. Two paintings, measuring in total 40 ft x 9, formed a part of 'This Be Thy Hour", a contemporary dance performance featuring Ed Mitten and Nol Simonse. The work will travel to London later in 2025.

EXCERPT FROM FESTIVAL TEXT.

 " The starting point for this set design was a series of paintings I made based on Alain Guiraudie’s 2013 film ‘Stranger by the Lake’. I was interested in the range of interactions and emotions the film explores, from erotic desire to the ways lust can blind us to danger, and the painful contradiction of a basic human need for companionship existing within a context of alienating loneliness. The restriction of the film to a lakeside cruising ground and the role played by the landscape resonated with my own exploration of paintings as an arena or stage, into which characters leave, act, and then depart. After conversations with the choreographer Stephen Pelton, and my own earlier interest in the in potential for collaboration between visual art and dance, I created a large-scale set design referencing these paintings. The work operates as a frieze, constructing a loose, non-illustrative narrative from the entry of the protagonist into the space through his searching out and acting on erotic desire and to a final satiation. The painting travels from afternoon to night and sits in a kind of unspoken dialogue with the dance that plays out in front of it."

Gavin Maughfling, 2024

This Be Thy Hour. Art Dance Collaboration with Stephen Pelton at the O+ Festival, Kingston New York

Looking at Tigers

Solo Pop Up Exhibiton at Bermondsey Project Space,

July 5 - July 6 from 11-6.

Private View Friday July 5 from 6-9

https://project-space.london/looking-at-tigers-gavin-maughfling-july-pop-up-2

Looking at Tigers, Bermondsey Project Space, July 5-6 2024

Recent works by Gavin Maughfling will be shown in a solo pop up solo exhibition at Bermondsey Project Space, London in July 2024.

Private View Friday July 5

Solo Exhibition, Bermondsey Poject Space London, July 2024

'Lift' was selected for  'Assembly', a painting show curated by Paula MacArthur with members of Contemporary British Painting and invited artists, at Rye Creative Centre, May 2024.

Assembly, Rye Creative Centre

'Departure' was selected for Newcastle X, a major retrospective of work marking ten years of Contemporary British Painting.

Newcastle X, June 2023

March 2023. Invited to join British Contemporary Painting.

Website:  https://www.contemporarybritishpainting.com/

IG: @paintbritain

Invited to join Contemporary British Painting

Invited by Moca London to be featured in the gallery's web exhibition programme. There are two parts to the Moca web programme: a web page with twelve paintings from the artist's most recent series with a supporting text, and an Instagram feed running  through January and February, showcasing eight paintings and four film scans panning across the surface. of the paintings.

With Many Thanks to all at Moca London; to Michael Petry, to Roberto Eckholm and to Viola Farinella.

https://www.moca.london/we_gavinmaughfling.html

https://www.instagram.com/mocalondon_we/

Web Exhibition Artist, Moca London. January - February 2023

'Dust' and 'The Wall' were slected for the 2022 Beep Painting Biennial Prize, exhibited at the Elysium Gallery, Swansea from July 29-September 10, 2022.

http://www.beeppaintingbiennial.com/

Beep Painting Biennial Painting Prize 2022

2022 Queer Frontiers Exhibition, held at 7-9 Walker Court, Soho from  29 June to 29 July.

Queer Frontiers 2022

As a part of their celebration LGBTQIA+ Month, featuring exhibitions, film showings, discussion panels,  performances and spoken word events, Bermondsey Project Space is showing 'Figure and Ground', a group exhibition which brings together works by KV Duong, Radek Husak, Gavin Maughfling and James Robert Morrison.
 

The artists in Figure and Ground explore real and dreamt spaces as a rebellion against heteronormative environments and present new psychological realities to escape to. Thee gallery has created an online catalogue for this exhibition.

https://project-space.london/figure-and-ground

Exhibition dates: 15 - 26 February. 

Private View 16 February, 6 - 9

Meet the Artists closing event, 26 February, 2 - 5

Figure and Ground at Bermondsey Project Space

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

Gavin Maughfling

no format Gallery

Casting House, Moulding Lane, off Arklow Road, Deptford, SE14 6BN

Private View Wednesday November 24, 6 - 9 PM

Exhibition runs November 25 - 28

Opening hours: Thursday & Friday 2 – 5 PM, Saturday and Sunday 1 – 6 PM

Artist talk: Saturday November  27, 3 – 5 PM

These new paintings reach beyond the specific narrative of the photographic image. Originating in Alain Guiraudie’s 2013 film L’Inconnu du lac, as well as in found images of cruising sites, they explore themes of loneliness and casual rejection; of hope and waiting; of sudden and unexpected acts of kindness and queer companionship; of the collision of desire and danger; and of the role of their landscapes, which appear to both witness and reflect and ultimately absorb the events they contain.

 Engaging in part in a conversation with the history of narrative painting and scenes of Arcady and myth, reset in a contemporary context, their pictorial spaces work as theatrical stages. The landscapes are arenas into which the protagonists enter and play out different dramas of desire, waiting, rejection, encounter, sex and vanishing. Behind them is an ever-present echo of Titian’s two Diana Acteon paintings. Acteon the hunter pulls back the curtain, making us the viewers complicit in his own voyeurism. In his death, the landscape is witness to a small event unseen by human eye, and when the action has passed, will return again to its mute emptiness on a blustery autumn afternoon.

Gavin Maughfling’s recent exhibitions include Beep Painting Biennial, Elysium Gallery 2020, between parts undone, studio1.1 Gallery London, 2020; Creekside Open 2019, APT London; Artworks 2019, Barbican Art Trust; Did You See Me Coming?, no format Gallery 2019; Beyond the Binaries, House of St. Barnabas, London 2018, Ghost on the Wire 2, Objectifs, Singapore 2016 and Over Time at the University of Greenwich and National Maritime Museum 2014. With Suzanne de Emmony, he has co-curated major international exhibitions in the UK and Singapore. He is currently working with Steph Goodger on Pull Back The Curtain, a project that explores unseen but sensed traces of events, with a forthcoming exhibition at Rosalux Galley, Berlin.

Gallery conversation with Gavin Maughfling and Steph Goodger:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWdPguyIgviOpXjyxwtCDRQ

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter