George Shaw
Born: 1966 in Coventry. Nationality: British.
Shaw studied at Sheffield Polytechnic from 1986 to 1989 where he was awarded a BA in Fine Art, he also completed a Post Graduate Certificate in Education there in 1991/1992. He went on to take the MA course in Painting at the Royal College of Art, 1996 to 1998
His exhibiting career began while still a student and he quickly attracted critical acclaim for his meticulously painted aspects of the suburban landscape, specifically in the housing estate and the adjacent woodland where he grew up in Coventry. His unusual choice of medium was Humbrol enamel paints, widely used to paint plastic models of aeroplanes, tanks and cars.
His images of these unassuming scenes, devoid of any human presence and sometimes featuring derelict and neglected backwaters, were imbued with a poetic sensibility and a powerful sense of presence.
His work has been represented in numerous group and solo exhibitions throughout the UK and further afield in Austria, Japan, China, Belgium, Romania, Japan, America, France and the Czech Republic, for example.
Works by Shaw have been acquired by many public collections including the Arts Council Collection, Tate Gallery, Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery, British Council, Government Collection, National Museum of Wales, Worcester City Art Gallery, Middlesbrough Art Gallery, Cincinnati Art Museum and the Olbricht Collection, Essen
In 2011 he was nominated for the Turner Prize and in 2014 was invited to become an Associate Artist at the National Gallery for two years which resulted in an acclaimed exhibition ‘My Back to Nature’, a response to work of masters of landscape painting including Titian, Poussin and Constable; this was subsequently toured to six UK galleries in 2017 and 2018.