Alasdair Wallace b. 1967

Overview

Alasdair Wallace's art is suffused with the surrealism of the everyday. His richly worked and allusively plotted paintings present a world that is at once recognisable and unsettling. It is a world full of odd juxtapositions and unexplained presences.

Wallace lives and works in Glasgow, and the city's 'edgelands' provide a recurring motif for his work. He finds a rich space for his artistic imagination in the unfixed margin between the modern city and the countryside that surrounds it. From it he has distilled a unique vision, one touched with humour, mystery and a subtle sense of pathos.

'It's a strange life,' Wallace explains, 'and I wander through it drawing together influences and experiences to make these absurd icons.'

Wallace studied at the Glasgow School of Art (where he won the J.D. Kelly Award for the most promising student in his year). He exhibits regularly at the Royal Scottish Academy. In 1999 the RSA presented him the Guthrie Award. In 2001 he won the Noble Grossart Painting Prize. His work was included in the major survey show of Scottish painting at the Fleming Collection gallery in London in 2009. Wallace exhibited in the Royal Scottish Society of Painters in Watercolour's annual show in 2015, where he was awarded two prizes, the House for an Art Lover Prize and the Walter Scott Prize.

Works