Marcus Nisbet Dark Fountain

Marcus Nisbet takes a highly inventive approach to the themes of inspiration and creativity with his latest series of paintings. Turning accepted practice on its head he begins with a full-scale, completed canvas (‘Nothing is Sacred’, below), rich in ideas and imagery, and uses this as the inspiration for a series of smaller studies drawing on the original. Alluring and sometimes dark, these works depict figures that spring directly from the artist's imagination and memory. Marcus uses dynamic contrasts of colour and scale in works that explore levels of perception, their characters acting out unexplained rituals or dances against a backdrop of giant, screened images to which they appear to bear no relation. This deeply absorbing exhibition reveals the artist at his most mysterious and, arguably, confessional. A must for serious gallery goers.