Jeffrey Dennis

Biography

Jeffrey Dennis is a painter and Senior Lecturer on the Fine Art Programme at Chelsea College of Arts and supervisor to Chelsea, Camberwell and Wimbledon research students.

His paintings are in the collections of the Arts Council of England, the British Council, Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris, Leeds Art Gallery, Priseman Seabrook Collection, the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Swindon Museum & Art Gallery, the Tate, and private collections worldwide.

He was the subject of a major solo exhibition 'Ringbinder', 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 was selected to participate in the DACS project Art360, developing and sustaining the archives of 100 leading modern and contemporary British artists.

My 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.