References:

• Beyond Pleasure: Freud, Lacan, Barthes
  Margaret Iversen
  The Pennsylvania State University Press
  ISBN 978-0-271-02971-9
• Medicine and Magnificence: British Hospital and Asylum Architecture 1660 – 1815
  Christine Stevenson
  Yale University Press
  ISBN 0-300-08536-2
• The Origin of Perspective
  Hubert Damisch
  The MIT Press
  ISBN 978-0-262-04139-3
• Perspective as Symbolic Form
  Erwin Panofsky
  Zone Books
  ISBN 0-942299-52-3
• On Painting
  Leon Battista Alberti
  Yale University Press
  ISBN 0-300-00001-4
• Looking at the Overlooked
  Norman Bryson
  Reaktion Books Ltd
  ISBN 0-948462-06-x

The eight oil paintings in this series were produced by Robert Priseman between 2004-2006 and were first shown at Derby Museums and Art Gallery in a tie-in exhibition with the Joseph Wright Collection in 2007. Each painting presents a medical environment empty of people. Each room is sealed from the outside world and lit artificially. All signs and labels have been erased and all movement stopped. These are environments built for a specific function, yet they remain absent of action. They are in essence, still-life.

Key influences on these works are the scientific paintings by Joseph Wright of Derby and the fluorescent light installations of Dan Flavin. Further influences come in the form of Edward Hopper’s alienating worlds of urban isolation and Magritte’s beautifully balanced painting of 1954 ‘The Empire of Lights’ where life is seen to be in a delicate state of flux and transition. This is echoed in the ‘Hospital’ series where the environments see the human body held without hierarchy or function but existing between two states of being.

A 48 page book featuring these paintings which includes essays by Margaret Iversen and Ben Cranfield is also available.

Quotes

“Natural light is banished, as is any hint of social reassurance…you are left utterly on your own. Vunerable flesh up against the clinical impersonality of mortality”
Robert Clarke, The Guardian Guide, April 14, 2007

“Lonely places yet familiar, the colours cold, attractive and surprising…these clinical institutions become their own characters, creating (…) fearful speculation. Not alienating, somehow strangely moving.”
Sir Derek Jacobi, 2005

www.robert-priseman.com