Jock McFadyen RA
Tourist without a Guidebook
5 February - 10 April 2022
Weston Rooms
Tues – Sun: 10am – 6pm
Free, no booking required
Friends of the RA go free
Bringing together 20 works spanning almost 30 years, this free display in the Weston Rooms explores Jock McFadyen’s fascination with London’s changing urban landscapes.
Please note:
• You don’t need a ticket to visit this free display.
• Download our large print guide.
Jock McFadyen's free display features large vistas of London, especially east London, in a state of transformation. Here, the landscape and the built environment morph into one another, with graffiti, litter, peeling posters and shop signs alluding to the city’s inhabitants, whose presence is felt, albeit out of frame.
Across these paintings, buildings take on human characteristics – broken windows, shuttered doors, painterly scars and a sense of faded grandeur hinting at their past lives and occupants.
The display takes its title from an essay by Tom Lubbock, who described McFadyen's approach to painting as, “like a sightseer without a guidebook” – a phrase that struck a chord with McFadyen. "He had perfectly described my attitude to painting places, and since that time I have carried the words close to my heart as I wander about the place not looking for anything.”
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Gallery
Tate Moss, 2010
Tate Moss depicts an abandoned condemned factory on the site of the future London 2012 Olympics, steel-framed windows broken, blue sky visible through its brick shell and a plastic chair dangling upstairs. The spray-painted slogan ‘Tate Moss’ could be an ironic comment on the intersection of art museums and fashion. The cryptic lettering ‘IDST’ stands for ‘if destroyed still true.’ McFadyen painted this following a clandestine visit to the site of the future London 2012 Olympics with writer Iain Sinclair. They succeeded in bypassing perimeter security by entering in an inflatable kayak. Iain Sinclair lamented the impact of the Olympic ‘regeneration’ project on Hackney in his book Ghost Milk (2011)
Olympia 2, 2011
Olympia 2 features two iconic structures of the London 2012 Olympics: the Olympic stadium and the Orbit Tower designed by Sir Anish Kapoor RA, but they are obscured by hoardings adorned with graffiti, one looping red scrawl laconically echoing the shape of the Orbit. Ever alert to changes in the urban environment, McFadyen highlights the multiple competing forces that shape our cities
K.M.B. , 2007-2008
Charlie Chaplin and a companion stick figure stand as ciphers for the human activity evident in the graffiti tags, barbed wire, and fluttering hazard tape caught in a stunted tree. The horizontal bands of (blurred) street and (static) sky lend a cinematic feel to the scene, as if glimpsed from a moving vehicle. The controversial motto ‘Kill Matthew Barney’ is obscured with black paint. Although this painting appears to be a scrupulously concrete record of the bleak urban environment, it is in fact a composite of motifs. This is the Diploma Work that McFadyen chose to present to the Royal Academy following his election as a Royal Academician in 2012
Pink Flats, 2006
This local authority housing block enjoyed a view over the Grand Union Canal on the border of Hackney and Shoreditch before luxury new apartments were erected in front of it. Here, McFadyen transposes the pink flats to a new location with a view in the Lea Valley. As McFadyen explains: ‘The figures on the roof are residents who have woken up to an unfamiliar location and have gone to survey where they are.’
Goodfellas, 2001
Goodfellas nightclub stands on the former A13 at Dagenham, occupying a building that was once an art deco cinema, its grandeur much faded. It was presumably named by optimistic proprietors hoping to entice customers by vicarious glamorous association with Martin Scorsese’s 1990 gangster movie. It promises a nightly fantasy escape from the suburban wasteland made apparent by the adjacent parade of shops with its mock-Tudor architecture, broken windowpanes, and shuttered shop front. There is a cinematic detachment to McFadyen’s depiction. The horizontal bands of street and sky imply a location seen from a moving vehicle, which has the effect of separating us as viewers from the (unseen) local inhabitants, while simultaneously simulating a sense of fleeting curiosity about their lives
Harvey 2, 2018
Several of McFadyen’s recent nightclub paintings feature ‘Harvey’, a reference to American actor Harvey Keitel, known for his portrayal of morally ambiguous and ‘tough guy’ characters.
Harvey 2 is also a self-portrait, features pressed close to the picture plane, the morbidity of the flesh clearly visible, a red gash on the forehead.
As McFadyen puts it: ‘We’ve all been in those bars where we’ve split up with somebody and gone for a drink alone, and found ourselves in those situations, and that’s what I was fishing for in these paintings’
Bank, 1997
To the casual London Tube traveller there would be ‘nothing to see here’, merely the scruffiness of a brick-lined station tunnel, where posters have been removed. McFadyen, however, finds the painterly possibilities in this palimpsest of urban life. The triptych format is unusual in the artist’s oeuvre; the Brick Lane studio that he was renting at the time was not big enough for a single canvas this size. Scale is important because it gives the viewer the equivalent encounter to standing a track’s width from the posters, filling our visual field
From the Greenway 3, 2003
From the Greenway depicts the first office blocks that transformed the Isle of Dogs into the upmarket financial district of Canary Wharf. A sublime sunset glows orange behind the new, artificially illuminated glass skyscrapers, while a brightly lit commuter train crosses the middle distance on the right. The grandeur of nature is matched by the ambition of urban transformation.
Less salubrious in the foreground is the scrubland of the Greenway, the road that covers London’s sewage outflow pipe, where assorted attempts at regeneration include a pathway across the marshland and a metal archway. The contrasts inherent in this scene are matched by McFadyen’s virtuosic display of different techniques: the liquid density of the clouds swept over a luminous underlayer; the scrubland rendered in thick impasto on a black gloss ground