past exhibition | The Package Holiday: Jake Clark | July-September 2024
The Package Holiday: Jake Clark
The Package Holiday presents a solo exhibition of new paintings by Jake Clark, responding to a selection of commercial photographs from the 1960s and 70s by the artist’s father, Trevor Clark, which will be available to view digitally in a second room.
Trevor Clark was the first British photographer to document the new hotels springing up in Mallorca, capturing this bygone era in numerous holiday brochures.
His pristine images, with their awkwardly posed bikini-clad protagonists and their flat saturated colours, evoke a time when the dream of foreign travel and escape from a rainy mundane Britain suddenly became possible for ordinary people.
Jake Clark’s painting practice has long been characterised by a fascination with the traditional British seaside, its faded colours, textures and shapes, as well as its idiosyncratic tourist activities such as crazy golf.
In The Package Holiday, his father’s highly constructed brochure images are a starting point for a new line of enquiry. The paintings’ high-contrast acidic palette creates an equally artificial type of space. Strong shadows block out parts of the figures and hold the image down onto the surface. A heady combination of figuration, abstraction, collage, disrupted imagery and textured surfaces evokes sensation, suggesting a visceral and more critical attempt to engage with memory and with painting itself.
Jake Clark writes ‘this show is made up of paintings inspired by my father’s brochure photographs. The subject matter, the colours and the humour have been an influence on these new paintings. Recently, I have been looking through a more personal perspective and bringing my own narratives, via the painting process.’
Recent mass protests against excessive tourism in holiday destinations such as the Balearic and the Canary Islands give a further dimension to this exhibition’s engagement with the cliches of ‘sun, sand and sangria’.
Jake Clark is a graduate of Royal College of Art (MA Painting) and Brighton Polytechnic (BA Fine Art). He has exhibited widely, including John Moores Painting Prize exhibition (1993, 2002,2008 & 2018). Recent exhibitions include The Art of Painting (Copeland gallery) and Incomers (Bobinska Brownlee). Residencies include North Devon Artist Residency.
Trevor Clark (1933-2018) gained prominence as a fashion and advertising photographer in Soho in the ‘Swinging Sixties’. He relocated to Mallorca in 1970 where he continued his commercial practice at a timely moment for the package holiday explosion.
Jake Clark has collected a selection of his father’s photographs in the book The Package Holiday 1968-1985 (published by Hoxton Mini Press 2024). A slideshow of the photographs will be available to view at the gallery.
Artist talk: Saturday 7 September 3pm, all welcome
Jake Clark in conversation with Jan-Carlos Kucharek