Overview
Scantily clad women, masterpieces of modern art and white gallery walls. These are the juxtapositions that confront the viewer of Ian Scott's exhibition Late Models at Gow Langsford gallery.
Since the early 1960s Scott's work has moved between two seemingly disparate strands of painting - the conceptual pop art of his Girlie Series from the late 1960s and abstraction as seen in his Lattice Series of the mid 1970s. In his Model Series which began in 1996, Scott pulls his three concerns of abstraction, pop art and realism together.
Despite the fact the female nude is an everyday subject of art, the viewer of these works is made acutely aware of their own position as observer and is challenged not only with where to look, but also with how to view themselves in relation to the paintings. The primary reason for this difficulty, is of course, the near naked models who openly display their sexuality. It would be easy to dismiss these works as simple objectification but in bringing together disjunctive elements (the women, the works and the walls) Scott’s paintings are intentionally unsettling and strangely compelling.