Michael Paramore Montgomeryshire, United Kingdom

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In group shows I want my work to feel like someone has placed an overly kitsch and whimsical Duccio in a room full of 18th century British landscapes — as if a figure has escaped from a fresco on a church wall in Siena and is wreaking havoc.

The pallid creatures with red cheeks and beatific glares inhabit rooms that feel completely sealed — like the inside of a dolls house, totally enclosed, airless, as though nothing of the world exists beyond the walls. No sky through the windows. No street outside. A world contracted to these four walls and the patterns on them, and that contraction is where the psychological pressure comes from.

The work sits at the collision point between two worlds that rarely meet: the heightened domestic drama of Mike Leigh's Abigail's Party and the raw, unadorned working-class realism of Ken Loach's Kes — held together by dominating pattern, clothing from vintage knitwear catalogues and the flat, luminous palette of Sienese painting.

The paintings work through a layering of cultural cyphers — kitsch, religion, pattern, domestic interiors, social relations — each one familiar, each one slightly wrong. Pattern and home decoration are not nostalgic indulgence but the work's active engine: the language through which psychological and social meaning is carried. Drama and loud wallpaper collides with childhood fears, abusive, strange and overbearing relationships, and trauma — where innocence manifests in plastic ornaments and pot dogs and the danger lies behind every calm half smile.

The figures are like actors on a stage, entering the room to play a part. Like the stock characters of Commedia dell'Arte transplanted into a northern interior, they are both entirely familiar and completely out of place.

Artwork

Like the shy one at some orgy, Acrylic on canvas`, 2026

Michael Paramore Montgomeryshire, United Kingdom Back to profiles Invite to apply

Artwork

Michael Paramore Montgomeryshire, United Kingdom

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