Anthony Xuereb

I am a painter. I live and work between Belfast and London, and my subject, in one form or another, has always been the same: the environments people build, and the people experiencing an existence within them.

The looking began early. I was born in Whitechapel in 1987 and grew up in the East End as the towers of Docklands rose over it — a place remaking itself around the people who already lived there.

I found oil paint at fifteen, in a dusty wooden trunk emblazoned with a patina of pigment, sitting in the corner of the classroom under a pile of used work shirts. The first painting I made was a man’s face on a Rembrandt-brown ground. The movement and scope of the paint were so endearing that I don’t remember looking up from the oil paper for more than a second, to glance at the pot of white spirit. I have been in love with the pigment-lavish stuff since. I studied art from sixteen and took my BA (Hons) in Fine Art at Nottingham Trent University; painting is the centre of the practice, and photography, printmaking, sculpture and video orbit it.

The method is the flâneur’s. I walk cities and photograph the people who pass through them and the buildings that outlast them, then paint from the photographs — painting gives me time to contemplate what I have seen, and to catch the nuances that are easily overlooked. Nothing is staged. The ideal is the person caught in time, in their assumed environment, in a language that relays my feelings on their feelings. I am interested in systems and collectives: how, from many individuals, a new whole emerges and takes on an existence of its own — how meaning gathers in a face, a street, a wall, over time.

For a decade in London, the practice widened into rooms. In 2011 I took on an empty railway arch on Cambridge Heath Road and opened The Arch Gallery, Bethnal Green — first a gallery and coffee shop, then a bar, restaurant and one of London’s best-loved underground jazz rooms. From 2016 to 2019 I ran The Five Bells in New Cross, a public house a short walk from Goldsmiths that became a home for the university’s artists and musicians alongside its own local crowd. Both were covered by the BBC for their artistic programming. Bourriaud describes the exhibition as a place of production rather than a happy ending; running those rooms taught me the same thing at street level, years before I read it.

The work now begins not with a subject but with a question I cannot resolve. I am drawn to the places where human behaviour becomes irreconcilable with what we believe ourselves to be, and A Line Through Every Heart is the most demanding work I have undertaken, historically, morally, and technically. The first painting is a portrait of Janusz Korczak, the man who had every chance to survive and chose instead to walk with the children in his care to the trains bound for Treblinka. He is the moral foundation of the exhibition.

I do not make this work to provide answers. I make it because the questions it raises are still alive, and because painting — slow, physical, irreducible — is the right medium for asking. What would I do?

New paintings and work in progress appear first on Instagram, @awxuereb. For studio enquiries and commissions, write to anthony@xuereb.co.uk.