Paul Day

Plus One Gallery is proud to hold a solo exhibition of various limited edition terra cotta resin and bronze sculptures by Paul Day, covering a period of 10 years. Each work displays his remarkable skill and unique take on depth and perspective. 

Paul Day is among the leading young sculptors in Britain today. Best known for his Battle of Britain Monument situated on the Embankment opposite the London Eye, his high relief sculptures can also be seen along the Mall forming part of the recently inaugurated Queen Mother Memorial. 

Day sculpts scenes from contemporary life in 3D with wit and theatricality. The subject of his work is often banal, but Day has a way of treating his figures that imbues them with a potency suggesting deep rumblings below the surface, as if a drama is never far away. The human condition is precisely that: the common, ordinary world gives us a sense of permanence and regularity and yet we all hang by a thread over the metaphysical void. Day's sculpture raises awareness of that predicament. 

Day has a keen affinity with architecture and the built environment. His dramatic use of perspective creates highly believable spaces that induce in the viewer sensations of vertigo and flight. Buildings and people are modeled in a foreshortened perspective which disturbs the eye and questions the way we see things. Curiously, there is something of a virtual reality about this work. Illusory space and real space combined struggle for supremacy under our gaze. 

Day's work has been compared to the narrative themes of a comic strip: not obscure, but clear and easy to read. He refers to the art of the Cathedrals: altarpieces and stained glass windows, as being the comic strip of their age, stories written in pictures to be read and understood by society as a whole. 

At first glance one may well ask oneself just where these reliefs come from, from which century? But look closer and it is very obvious that they are made by someone who lives in the age of cinema and the omnipresent lens. Lens distortion and zoom effects cannot be found in an altarpiece by Tilman Riemanschneider but are very present in the work of Paul Day. 

Paul Day lives and works in France.