In his latest exhibition entitled New Work, John Oxborough continues to develop the relationship between his subject matter and the formal aspects of painting such as colour, line and form. Oxborough draws attention to the visceral, sensual and hidden aspects of the body only to shroud them in the mystery of painting itself.
It is important to him that no single aspect of the work dominates, he “wants(s) the figure and ground to have an equal relationship.” It is this aspect of his work which lies at the heart of the creative process.
Oxborough works intuitively and spontaneously with paint and colour, and as such, the way in which the figurative components of the work emerge and come to occupy the two dimensional space is only loosely thought out initially. Thus, the predominant force of the work results from the sparsity of solid form, a spontaneous palette and a certain ambiguity surrounding what the viewer is actually looking at.