He is an artist based in London and has shown work internationally in many important exhibitions including the 2002 Sydney Biennial, “Hollywood is a Verb” at Gagosian Gallery in New York, the 19th John Moore’s Painting Prize at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, “Die Young Stay Pretty” at the ICA London.
He makes paintings of famous places he’s never seen. Offering plausible suggestions of those iconic haunts lingering invisibly in collective consciousness, Dalwood pictures his own documentation of history.
McCarthy’s living room, Kurt Cobain’s greenhouse, or Jackie O’s yacht are depicted with uncanny believability; not as real occupied places, but our media-constructed fantasies of them. Devoid of any bric-a-brac signs of human life, Dexter Dalwood pictures these lairs of rumour with Hello! magazine cleanliness; show homes of glamour, dark theme-park panoramas of gossip tourism.
Through painting, he masters the strategies of propaganda dissemination and the superfluous nature of information currency in a mass media age. Working in the traditional genre of historical painting, Dexter Dalwood presents the makings of our sociological zeitgeist as an elevated hierarchy of lasting cultural significance.
