Michael Fullerton “Victoria’s Secret Diary”

Greene Naftali Gallery

[Image: "Michael Fullerton, Christian Nationalist (Spanish Civil War)" (2020) Courtesy the artist and Greene Naftali, New York.]

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8th Floor

Greene Naftali presents Victoria’s Secret Diary, the gallery’s third solo exhibition with Scottish artist Michael Fullerton. Fullerton uses the genre of portraiture to reveal painting’s complicity in the machinations of power, examining the tacit role of images in constructions of social class and national identity. The artist will present a new group of paintings depicting both prominent and little-known figures—from Gustave Courbet to economist Joseph Stiglitz to a fascist nun in Franco’s Spain—alongside a silkscreened excerpt from the diary of a teenage Queen Victoria. The muted, earnest style of his portraits belies the work’s critical edge, which conceives of the painted surface as a conveyor of information both ideological and affective. Fullerton uses the exhibition itself as a medium to forge complex networks of latent connections, seizing on figures who embody facets of the modernist project and its prolonged dissolution.

Michael Fullerton lives and works in Glasgow. Recent solo exhibitions include Queens Park Railway Club, Glasgow, for Glasgow International 2018; Carl Freedman Gallery, London (2015); S1 Space, Sheffield and Graves Gallery, Museums Sheffield, UK (2015); Greene Naftali, New York (2014); Chisenhale Gallery, London (2010); Carl Freedman Gallery, London (2007); and Tate Britain, London (2005).

His work is in the collections of Tate Britain, London; Arts Council Collection, London; Cranford Collection, London; Farjam Collection, Dubai; Francois Pinault Foundation, Venice; Saatchi Gallery, London; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; and Zabludowicz Collection, London.