Crowds

Arthur Arnold’s Crowds series explores human groups and the integration of the individual into a collective identity. Parties, protests, religious and political meetings, football crowds, concerts and large-scale events are manifestations here of the same experience: people who, when brought together, allow themselves to be absorbed into the mass. Arthur is not interested in the specific motivations of each group, nor does he assign value to their passions or beliefs. Instead, he focuses on the experience of belonging as a response to the transience of life.

The artist reproduces this process in the act of painting itself. Working from photographs and drawings, he distorts and disfigures individual features until people become a mass. Matter and pictorial construction come together in compositions that place presence, anonymity and belonging in tension. Large quantities of material are applied in thick layers, with palette-knife marks, scraping and occasional brushstrokes that leave traces and build up matter on the surface. The gesture pushes the work to the boundary between figuration and abstraction: we recognize the crowd, but cannot identify its individuals.