Marc Chaimowicz (1946 – )

Marc Camille Chaimowicz was born in post-war Paris, but moved in childhood to Stevenage New Town. He studied painting at Ealing School of Art and later at Camberwell College of Arts in London. After a visit to Paris in 1968, Chaimowicz abandoned work as painter, overwhelmed by the complexity of the painting he had seen and magnetised by the socio-political ferment of Paris at that time. At the Slade School of Fine Art he began to make performances and installations, but his first ambitious and extrovert manifestations culminated again in a reassessment of the essential nature of his activity as an artist, a retreat into privacy. Chaimowicz began to draw on the imagery of his own intimate world which can be glimpsed but never fully grasped by any but its creator. His use of the camera was personal and specific. The images were carefully constructed, cultured, synthetic, giving substance to the fugitive and insubstantial: the play of shadow on a wall, sunlight filtered through a gauze curtain, the dip of a flower stem, the meeting point of object and image on a mirrored surface, The artist, author and subject of the work was a discreet presence. In Interval, images of the artist’s internal world are juxtaposed with references to objects and places which defined his sensibility, evoking a world within a world. The presentation further distanced the images from the reality they depict: touched with washes of colour, pressed within panes of glass, they appear as enigmatic fragments, awaiting completion by the wall on which they hang.