Alan Ibell

Alan Ibell is a contemporary artist and painter. Born 1983 Ōtautahi, he lives in Papaioea, Palmerston North.

Alan’s painting practice explores narrative and figuration alongside the uncanny and the Antipodean Gothic. Borrowing imagery from dreams, memories, personal anxieties and existential musings, Alan creates visual allegories of a perilous paradise that is tranquil, inescapable, and disjointed. Subtly citing frescos by painters of the early Renaissance period—Giotto, Fra Angelico and Piero della Francesca—the soft and delicately rendered texture of his paintings feel as if they are mixed deep into plaster. His use of dislocation and non-linear perspective suggest a fragmented narrative, a question of consciousness. Something isn’t quite right, questioning what is real and what is imagined.

Visually Alan leaves us a great deal of time with our own thoughts. His pared back paintings and sparsely populated landscapes convey psychologically charged environments. They contain just a smattering of narrative across a subdued pastel ground—a lone figure, a floating jug, a desolate landscape—enough to convey ideas without becoming abstract. The more space he leaves, the more our own memories fill in the blanks, allowing for both contemplation and a little subconscious wandering. His works hold no specific clues to a location or an idea of place. They delicately oscillate in the space between the banal and the surreal, the physical and the imagined.