Ransome Stanley: Close Distance

Gallery Momo presents Close Distance Ransome Stanley’s third solo exhibition with the gallery.

"In my paintings there is no reason to recount a linear plot, rather i utilize the design experience to create complex spaces.I move across the border between two worlds playing with different forms of conscious perception. I am concerned with discontinuity of space and time."

- Ransome Stanley -

Ransome Stanley was born in England and spent his childhood in a small German village near the Swiss border. He studied in Stuttgart and has lived in Munich since 1986, working as a freelance artist since 1989. Germany is thus his prime living space. As a German-Nigerian, however, Stanley shifts between worlds.
In his works, Stanley creates connections between Africa and Europe, between past and present. In thematising his living space, which naturally also contains a temporal aspect, he is inevitably always in search of his own identity.
The concept of time is emphasised continually within Stanley’s aesthetic. He employs patina or rust to accentuate traces of the past, the transient and the ephemeral. The material used plays a central role in the perception of the paintings and the spaces revealed within them
He is inspired by photographs, magazines, advertising, old books, portraits, graffiti, toy figures and cartoon characters. By returning to previously encountered motifs, he creates links with diverse temporal dimensions, the colonial era or a specific present.
Some themes explored in this body of work include: erotic tension between black and white, taboos and desire. Another focus is capitalism as the dominant paradigm in the globalised world, corruption, the clash of extrinsic cultural elements before everything is repositioned and reorganized. These realities are expressed in the paintings’ ambiguity and ambivalence.
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