(NGCA) Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art - Graham Dolphin Exhibition.

The Northern Gallery of Contemporary Art (NGCA) presented a major survey of works by Graham Dolphin.

On Exhibition: 22nd July - 22nd October 2016

Dolphin's exhibition included drawing, sculpture, sound and video. The exhibition showed a selection of works drawn from private collections alongside pieces that had been specifically created for the NGCA.

I visited the (NGCA) Northern Gallery of Contemporary Art to see the work of Graham Dolphin as a result of a university visit.

It instantly became apparent to me that his artistic focus wasn't restricted to just one creative process but in fact a range. As a result of this ranging exploration of process and materials it offered a diverse selection of pieces. This therefore gave the impression that the exhibition was a group showing, rather than that of a sole Artist.

The drawings which were included as part of the Exhibition which are titled 'Self Portrait By Others' (2014 - ongoing) are produced by amateur artists which Graham Dolphin has contacted online to request them to produce a portrait of himself purely on the bases of a descriptive brief. This has therefore allowed him to gather a collection of portraits from a group of people he has never seen and is a way of him subsequently inverting his aim of showing the idea of idolatry. He looks at each portrait to be a more revealing insight into the individual behind the piece of portraiture rather than himself, based on the descriptive brief.

I find the practical process of creating my own work just as important as the idea behind it but I did however find Graham Dolphins approach to this collective group of portraits to be very inventive. Out of the series of pieces exhibited on the yellow wall I found myself visually focusing on only two of the pieces, one being a slightly realistic portrait with a slight background, and the other being a more characterised portrait.

Other pieces that were on show in the Exhibition and also caught my attention included pieces that were created using the use of directional repetitive pen work to subsequently produce pieces of work that from a distance looked to be coloured, geometric shapes but on closer inspection revealed drawn lines and written words. The simple idea of drawing a coloured pen line and then repeating the process in a horizontal direction over and over again across a large piece of paper offers a visually pleasing composition that somehow looks more complex than in reality. Similar to that of his collective group of small written words which when restricted to a specific area on a page allows a black square and a black circle to be seen from a distance.