LONDON.- British artist Noj Barker is to stage his first solo show in London in ten years at The Club at Ivy, London, opening 22 May 2019.

In the same way Giorgio Morandi (1890 - 1964) painted different arrangements of the same set of vases, bowls and pots, Barker paints dots. Into these he incorporates smaller dots, creating intense, intricately configured compositions. The resulting works, which are all rendered in acrylic, can be austere or flamboyant; singular monochromes or psychedelic, trippy whirligigs of colour.

BLINK - Barker’s first solo exhibition in London since his Saatch Gallery presentation in 2010 - is formed of three parts. Arrayed on the Ivy’s rear walls are the most recent works, three silkscreen prints that has been created through digital manipulation of images of original paintings.

Barker’s Radstone series, executed between 2018 and 2019, will be displayed in box frames bathed in ultravioley light. These paintings, for which Barker has employed multifarious competing colours, are complimented by suite of works from the same period. For some of these, Barker employs the dash motif, which, when seen beside the more familiar dots, might be construed as Morse code, itself a sequence of dashes and dots.

Says art writer Harry Dougall. ‘In a world of increasingly polarised division, it’s important to be able to step back, switch off and contemplate in order to try and make some sense of the world we inhabit. Through his art, Barker dives deep through that surface to focus on the vibrancy of colour and textures that connect our world, the things in life that we share are far more than that, that divides us.’