Ivan Seal British, b. 1973

Ivan Seal, born, 1973, in Stockport, UK, to a butcher and a ballroom dancer–that says it all really. At some point he moved to Berlin and has been based there since. In some interesting aspects, Seal’s work could be said to be ‘straight outta Stockport’–for memory, at least for the artist in question, must begin there. He paints from imagination, communications with the materials and canvas, and from memory with all the powers of its glitched magnificence and freighted psychological import. Sumptuous surfaces are called forth. Seal’s amalgams of collected scenes remembered are conjured into being without any referring object present in the room. A part of me is reaching for the metaphor of imagining Johns Chamberlain and McCracken, or David Smith making something like the work they did without the use of any materials–certainly not automotive body parts, resin and Styrofoam from surf culture, or machinic off-cuts reassembled. One of the most exciting things for me, about Ivan’s work, is that it blows preconceived ideas about painting out of the dusty cobwebs of a mind and does so while revelling in the materiality, mark and construction of a painted work. A bit like Arnold Schoenberg’s twelve tones applied perhaps not so much to paint as its ur-form in the blank canvas. I know few artists who appreciate and agree with my own sentiments regarding the qualities, or perfections even, of that ‘blank page’. Who in their right mind would wreck it? Surely, only a holy fool, idiot savant, artist or genius. To approach the medium with trepidation or reverence leads to certain disaster. The most important thing, as Ivan often says, is: ‘to show up’. But then, so too, one crucially has to engage fully while all the time appearing to not really give a fuck. 

–John Slyce