Michael Chance

Lamassu

Limestone carving

22.5 x 28cm

About:

Michael Chance is a painter based in London, roaming around on a narrowboat and working in their studio in Hackney Wick. Their art practice started a little later than most since they first studied Popular Music at Liverpool University, an academic degree focused primarily on critical theory, feminist approaches to music history and film studies. Their thesis was an in-depth examination of the filmmaker Peter Greenaway, combining theory from the worlds of fine art, film and Frankfurt School philosophy. Michael then spent a few years playing in bands and designing posters, t-shirts and album covers in Manchester before moving to London in 2012 to study on the post-graduate programme at the Royal Drawing School.

Between 2014-18 Michael co-founded and ran Mercer Chance Gallery in Hoxton, London, showing emerging artists with a focus on drawing and painting. While being primarily a painter, Michael also produces music, sculpture, video, poetry and prose, which all feed into their practice and intersect with each other.

Michael’s work is sometimes a kind of privately codified auto-biography, at others more of an outward statement; pulling from imagination and observation, they seek personally meaningful images that resonate with larger political and philosophical themes.

A particular preoccupation is the confluence of patriarchal gender norms, capitalism and humanist exceptionalism which underwrites the Anthropocene. Michael is very interested in teasing apart traditional notions of gender, re-figuring a space between and beyond the ‘masculine/feminine’ binary. Their work has gradually pushed towards a synthetic-cubist language which enables images to overlay and enmesh with slippery, blurred boundaries, reflecting both their inner confusion and the wider need to embrace simultaneity and paradox as new forms of understanding.