Kit Poulson, Slouching towards Vitebsk, 2012, Oil, acrylic on linen, 110 x 140cm. Image courtesy of the artist and Foreground.
Synopsis
Chester Park Primary School is part of Bristol City Council’s Primary/Bristol series of artist commissions for primary schools commissioned as part of the Primary Capital Education Programme. As part of the development Bristol based artist Kit Poulson has been commissioned by Foreground to develop a new permanent artwork for the school.
Kit Poulson’s painting combines a complex history of ideas with an ever present, cheap and immediate sense of reinvention, a site of radical possibility. His work contains references ranging from classic landscape painting to historic meditation chambers to the stage sets for pantomimes. Created through execution of separate painting episodes on the same canvas, the paintings are often visually complex, physically dynamic presences that at once suggest representational relationships – landscape, figure, interior, event – but become overloaded, almost collapsing under the abstract weight of paint itself.
Commissioned by Foreground as part of Bristol City Council’s Primary Capital Programme of artist commissions for primary schools, Kit Poulson will make a new work for Chester Park Infants School in 2017.
Poulson will work into the broader design of the new school building but a major outcome of Poulson’s engagement with the school will be a monumental new painting for the double height central atrium of Chester Park Infants School. The central atrium is both an active learning environment housing the school’s library provision, a social space and the hub around which all the school’s classrooms are orientated. Poulson’s painting will dominate this space figuratively and literally placing art at the heart of the school.
This project has been commissioned and funded by Bristol City Council. The work will be permanently housed at Chester Park Infants School, Bristol.
This project has been made possible through funding from Bristol City Council as part of the Primary Capital Education Programme.
Kit Poulson was born in 1967 in East Bergholt in Suffolk. He studied in Edinburgh (History) and Middlesex Universities (Fine Art). Poulson works with painting, writing, performance and music and has exhibited widely in the UK. Significant recent projects include Qwaypurlake at Hauser and Wirth Somerset, (2015); Ice Cream Empires, works/projects gallery, Bristol (2013); Group exhibitions (2012); the book The Ice Cream Empire, published by Bookworks, London, (2012); the Space of Attention retreat and subsequent exhibition Solid on our Source Planet at Wysing Art Centre, (2012); the performance Lucky Lucy (he do the police in different voices), LUPA 8, London, (2012); Multiverse Expanded, Akershus Kunsthaus, Lillestrom, Norway, (2011); Phyllida Barlow and Friends, Café Oto, London, (2010); A.I.R Fellowship, Byam Shaw, University of the Arts, London, (2009) and the Wheatley Fellowship, Birmingham Institute of Art and Design, (2007). Poulson has work in private collections in the UK and is a senior lecturer in fine art at University of the West of England, Bristol.
Based in Frome, Somerset, Foreground brings new art to new audiences across the South West of England. We deliver an ambitious program that spans commissioning new temporary and permanent artworks in the diverse social and physical structures of communities, consultancy and development projects that explore the connectivity between the critical, social and economic aspects of contemporary art.
http://www.chesterpark-jun.bristol.sch.uk/
