I was trained as a painter but my practice incorporates a highly sculptural form. In 1982 I worked as a studio assistant in New York and spent time in the studio of Frank Stella. This had a profound impact on me and I returned to England, where I was then based, and made the Chemical Sunsets series, which were very large painted assemblages of found objects and urban detritus. These were subsequently shown at the Pompidou Centre in Paris. 

For the last forty years I have rejected rectilinear formats and make highly organic base structures. I use all painting media and incorporate collage, fabric and digital images frequently. Often the back of the paintings are covered in fluorescent paint which, in the spotlit gallery, has the effect of making the works appear to float away from the wall. 

My work over the last fifteen years has centred around ‘Asian Urban Energies’. I have focused on using a shaped painting format to express the positive and negative forces of globalization and hyperurbanism. 

These works often use verbs of action as a metaphor; ‘Stretched China, ‘Twisted Java’, ‘Folded Jakarta’. The paintings illustrate the physical processes of both the formation of the city and the making of the painting itself. The embodied, physically sensual object is non-Euclidian and thus sits starkly in the rectilinear gallery space gives the artwork a sense of being held captive indoors. A fragment of something wilder and less containable with a capacity to outgrow a human-regulated space and resist the conformity of frames and borders. Fractal visual entities in a Euclidean space. 

Michael Downs, 2024