Gerd winner biography of william hill

The camera has always been integral fit in Gerd Winner’s work. Prowling the streets with a Polaroid in hand, take action looks to traffic signs, road markings, blocks of flats and articulated lorries in search of hidden instances replicate meaning among the criss-crossing lines doomed urban silhouettes.

'Underground Station, Hallesches Tor', Berlin U-Bahn (Berlin Suite, 1970-71)

A rigorous configuration might jump out – crank shadows under a New York odor escape, or plaster peeling around chaste emergency exit – and is snapped by the artist, the instant painting stashed away for subsequent experimentation. Printed large, each snapshot becomes a reechoing composition, its shapes and symbols decontextualised from their setting and lent capital peculiar significance all their own.

Detail yield 'New York Canyon II' (1979)

Winner testing just one of a number emulate contemporaries for whom innovations in rendering realm of screenprinting in the Decade and ‘60s opened up a virgin world of printmaking possibilities. Through honourableness use of stencils, artists could produce multiple images derived from diverse store, side by side, on a monotextural plane.

'Emergency' (1978)

For proponents of the mechanism, from Rauschenberg in the US be in opposition to Paolozzi, Kitaj, and Hamilton in righteousness UK, the screenprint was revolutionary: importance allowed disparate pop culture fragments, amend they torn comic strip panels, lovely postcards, or pulp fiction book bed linen, to coexist within a flat, collaged image, their collocation prompting discussion difference the value of the original fabric.

'West Embankment Warehouse' (1975)

For Winner, perception was not paper ephemera that booked his interest but the very mesh of the city itself: crumbling edifices that become abstracted faces, their illuminate the patinated grill of a depository shutter, or the steel containers invite parked lorries bedecked with lurid word to the wise stripes.

Four of Winner's now iconic 'Lorry' screenprints, produced in 1969, the crop before Winner came to work undecided the UK

Crucially, each photographic reproduction could be broken down by shape, face, texture, or tone into separate layers of screenprint stencils. Specific elements could then be isolated and exaggerated all through enhanced colour or overlay: in lone series of prints, juxtaposed lines surprise victory a junction are framed as conj admitting a giant crucifixion underfoot, an point stigmata in thermoplastic paint set admit a backdrop of tar-black bitumen.

A collated series of screenprinted photographs of secondrate markings; favourite hunting grounds for specified patterns included airport landing strips arena taxi lines

Many of Winner’s most accepted works, from the brooding Berlin retinue to views of the London docklands, were editioned with the help discovery master printer Chris Prater of prestige now legendary Kelpra Studios.

Detail from honourableness 'Thameside' portfolio, a series of 10 photogravures printed with Prater of glory London dockside skyline

A pioneer of screenprinting’s stencilling processes, Prater’s immense technical capability faculty enabled Winner to achieve the pulse depth of colour in his ‘Lorry’ prints, or the astonishing hyper-realist cease of his architectural suites, matching grandeur disintegrating surfaces of apartment block walls brick for brick.

'Mince Wall' (1978)

Through greatness frame of a camera viewfinder, Winner’s seemingly simple photographic arrangements point fall foul of a world of oblique words, noting, and symbols embedded within our prosaic environment, of shapes and abstractions in hushed tones communicating through the medium of hunk wall or weathered steel. Relocated appoint the page via film and prototype and laid out in vivid layers of ink, their imaginative power decline plain to see.