Ross Chisholm

Using painting, drawing and found photographs, British artist Ross Chisholm (born 1977) recreates and then disrupts imagery mined from centuries of British visual culture, from eighteenth-century society portraiture by Allan Ramsay and Joshua Reynolds to photographs of twentieth-century families on vacation acquired at flea markets. Chisolm then painstakingly recreates these original images in the style of Old Master portraiture and genre scenes, sabotaging their historical gravitas with bizarre flourishes of abstraction or collage: rays of incongruous color surrounding a prim figure, a Gainsborough-style lady with a pig-faced man on her arm or two Old Master images super-imposed upon one another. With 40 color plates, this volume surveys his most recent works, which have already been exhibited in major galleries throughout Europe and the U.S.