Stephen Bush is a painter who investigates the historical development of realistic painting. In his well-known experimenting with painting’s methods and procedures as well as his use of intensified colour, Bush reimagines the narrative potential of the medium. His art often uses revision, contradiction, and juxtaposition. Modernist shapes frequently coexist with costumed individuals in idealised, mesmerising settings. His work is fundamentally concerned with capturing the conflicts between the original and the replica, the old and the new, the natural and the artificial, and the irrational and the logical.
Painter Bush investigates the origins and strategies of representational painting. Through intensified colour and surprising juxtapositions, in which costumed characters mix with modernist shapes in idealised, hypnotic settings, he reinvents the narrative potential of painting.