John Gathercole
John Gathercole is a painter, curator and gallerist from London. He achieved his BA at U.E.L. and his MA at London Met, both in fine art and studied life drawing at le Académie de la Grande Chaumière Paris. John has exhibited and sold world wide, including both Tate Modern and Britain.
He first found recognition as founder of The Kreative Union of Neo-Aesthetic Terrorists (the Kuntists), an anti art collective. Which has recently progressed into being one half of the Sons of Incoherence art duo.
He has managed three galleries in East London and Essex, run multiple workshops for the Royal Opera House and Thameside Theatre and is the creator of the Paint Off competitions (which raises money for charities). Currently John curates freelance and has returned to his first love of painting the figure.
He is firstly a painter, a figure painter.
He uses oil paint in a vibrant, energetic, narrative and visceral manner.
The work is pure figure versus figurative, mental versus emotional.
They ask the viewer to join dismembered narrative connections and consider the image as a whole.
Leaving them questioning and uneasy.
They deal with personal issues of loss, longing, need, comfort and solace in an increasingly unstable society.
His excitement of paint in itself is evident through out his work, particular with in the figure.
Influenced by Carl Jung, Gestalt theories and 1960s images and film the works encompass an intelligent and expressive abstract of someone trying to make sense of his life.
The Sons of Incoherence is an alternative art partnership with Johnny from the Kuntists and Sete from art duo Rart and Sete. They have combined to form a nouveau art resistance movement where nothing is sacred and everything is acceptable but indescribable.
Their name comes from The Incoherents (Les Arts Incohérents) A French art movement founded by Jules Lévy in 1882, which anticipated the avant-garde and anti-art pre-dating Duchamp and the Dadaists.
The Kreative Union of Neo-aesthetic Terrorists catechised what is consider art, exploring whether art is morally emancipating or socially engaging and what was consider art as both, good and bad, high and lowbrow. Through this they challenged the assumptions of established aesthetic criteria by employing subversive working agendas and disputing the role of the artist in society.
They went on to open a shop/gallery, ‘The Emporium’, in East London which allowed the group to pursue a commercial artistic venture, establishing the Kuntists as a brand and enterprise by producing a fanzine, clothing range, art gifts and dolls and also forming a band, releasing a CD ‘Art Noises’ and saw them aligned with the final years of the Y.B.A.s, (Young British Artists).