Martin Fowler/ Paintings

Fowler is a graduate of Drawing & Painting at Glasgow School of Art, Winchester School of Art, and Kunstakademie, Düsseldorf. Currently working as a Senior Lecturer in Painting at the University of Cumbria, Fowler completed his PhD in political aesthetics in 2022. For many years, Fowler taught painting to life-sentence prisoners in the Scottish prison system. He was born and raised in Portobello, Edinburgh, and currently lives in Cumbria.

Fun & Games Too:

A Canonical Penance For Sufferers Of Anti-Progressive Cynicism & Chronic Eczema is a series of oil paintings inspired by the blunt anti-Establishment writing of the Glasgow poet Tom Leonard and the paintings of Peter Saul circa 1962, Fowler’s acerbic paintings mobilise an embittered series of motifs to reject the collective delusions of the neoliberal progressive as embodied in the often self-serving venality of the professional middle class.

Set against the backdrop of a rising North Sea horizon indifferent to human suffering, a recurring image of an angel - dismembered, broken and pierced by syringes loaded with lethal toxins – is being blown backwards across the sky, whilst on the heavily polluted sea below, nuclear subs glide serenely past the triumphalist architecture of the world’s great financial centres. Referencing these false beacons of the military-industrial complex, Fowler’s paintings point to the causal networks that underpin a neoliberal delusion in which the experiencing human being is merely a ‘bought behaviour pattern’ and the natural world a benign source of never-ending profit. As such, Fowler’s pessimistic and often accelerationist paintings offer a cynical takedown of modern society’s agenda, corrupted language, and its ruling-class dogma.