Echo: Michael Craik

Echo is Michael Craik's first solo exhibition at &Gallery, following a two-person show with Jeffrey Cortland Jones in 2018. For Echo, Craik presents a new collection of contemplative, minimal acrylic paintings, which have been produced over the last year and continue his ongoing Veil and Vestige series. 

Craik's practice explores the interplay of colour and the subtleties of light as a means of producing quiet, pared-down, reductive artworks, concerned with material quality and the act of making. He slowly and methodically produces each painting over a period of weeks and months by repeatedly applying and removing paint. This process of layering and uncovering features throughout his work, alluding to the passage of time and the forces of erosion that form our landscape. The focus of these works often lies at the edges, where sanding reveals glimpses of underlying paint or exposed bands of colour that have been built up by brushing, pouring or spreading. Combined, these processes produce subtle shifts in tone and hue that fade across the smooth, unblemished surface of each work. Veils of colour dissolve and melt into one another, creating illusory spaces that echo memories of light and place. Viewers are invited to pause, reflect and search for echoes of their own experiences in Craik's absorbing paintings.