McClure Gallery Current Exhibitions

Ufuk Gueray The Unexamined Life

May 4 to 26, 2012
Vernissage: Thursday May 3 at 18 pm

The McClure Gallery is pleased to present The Unexamined Life, an exhibition of recent paintings by Ufuk Gueray. Gueray’s depicted world is littered with abandoned buildings, mutant plant life, and painterly debris. Driverless monster trucks rev their engines, but they are machines without purpose: they drive from A to B, but accomplish nothing.

The exhibition at the McClure Gallery will include over a dozen large, medium and small scale oil paintings on canvas. The garishly coloured wasteland of Gueray’s paintings is without ideology, without ethics: it is the home of directionless, mindless, and ultimately useless power.With no aim other than self-perpetuation, the power invoked in his paintings has nothing to do but revel in its own nihilistic energy. A spectacle without an audience, the post-apocalyptic life in Gueray’s painting is unreflective, unexamined, and thus, according to Socrates’s famous formulation, not worth living. But there is something attractive in all this decadent futility. This is reflected in the materiality of the work, where the allure of high gloss varnish is pitted against the stubborn inertness of a matt finish, and thick and goopy paint confronts insidious colour. The material spectacle generates a prolific and gritty beauty that both evokes the threat of unexamined power, and takes pleasure in the spectacle of ungovernable energy.

Ufuk Gueray was born in Herrenberg, Germany, and has lived in Germany, Canada and Scotland. He graduated with a BFA in Studio Art and French Studies from Concordia University in 2005, and obtained an MFA in Fine Art from the Glasgow School of Art in 2009. He received funding from the Student Award Agency for Scotland from 2007 to 2009, and was an artist in residence at the Klondike Institute of Art and Culture in Dawson City in the fall of 2010. His work has been exhibited in Canada, Germany and the United Kingdom.