Arthouse1 is delighted to announce the first one-person show by Benedict Pulsford, entitled New Abstract Painting. Pulsford is a reserved and private practitioner who has painted without interruption since graduating from the Slade in 1979 but who – until now – has never allowed himself a solo show. New Abtrscat Painntitg will comprise new, large format works, graphic works, and a number of context works by his father and stepfather, the artists Charles Pulsford and Robert Crawford, as well as a small work by Benedict Pulsford’s young son, Leonard Pulsford. The show will be curated by the artist and writer Neal Brown.

Pulsford’s works are intensely pleasurable,

but also have complexity:

His subjects, although highly abstracted, are gathered in compositional summonings that seem to be those of socially negotiated relationships, determined by ideas of trusting intimacy and anxious alienation – an almost bio-social existence. The subjects are suggestive of object forms that exist in the real world – sometimes prosaic objects, sometimes inherently beautiful ones. [ . . . ] Nothing is definitive, and consequently rich moods and feelings announce themselves – negotiations of ambivalent sensibility and feeling and mood: a world which is broken but coming together, and then breaking and coming together yet again. It is a world whose feelings are of exuberance, brightness and revelation, as well as of concealment and isolation – sometimes of pain, and sometimes of the very highest of high pleasures.

Benedict Pulsford Neal Brown, catalogue essay 2011

A FANCY: NEW ABTRSCAT PAINNTITG

Read Essay by Neal Brown