Jeffrey Dennis
Title
Senior Lecturer
College
University of the Arts London
Email address
Tags
Researcher Research
Biography
Jeffrey Dennis is a painter and Senior Lecturer on the Fine Art Programme at Chelsea College of Arts and supervisor to UAL research students.His paintings are in the collections of Arts Council England, British Council, Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris, Italian Government Art Collection, Keats-Shelley House, Rome, Leeds Art Gallery, Priseman Seabrook Collection, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Swindon Museum and Art Gallery, Tate, and private collections worldwide.
In 2021 he was awarded an Abbey Fellowship in Painting at the British School at Rome, making paintings related to the work and ideas of the poet John Keats in the 200th anniversary year of his death, and subsequently exhibited in the Keats-Shelley House in Rome.
In 2016 he was selected to participate in the DACS project Art360, developing and sustaining the archives of 100 leading modern and contemporary British artists.
A major solo exhibition 'Ringbinder' was presented at the Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art, Sunderland, UK in 2015, with an accompanying monograph published by NGCA and Slimvolume in 2017.
He has been exhibiting internationally since the mid-1980s.
He has written that his work: '... is rooted in the daily experience of the city: how people move around, inhabit spaces and make sense of their daily routines. Of particular relevance to this and to the structure of my paintings are the ideas of proximity, contiguity and adjacency: these terms express the abrupt collisions of style and taste evident in urban architecture, the habits nurtured by travellers and inhabitants to protect personal space and the interrupted narratives of encounters and conversations. The paintings themselves provide a fluid, mutable net to hold narrative fragments and connective elements in place; a landscape corresponding to the fragmentary mental maps which people construct in order to give their existence some measure of meaning.'