Biography

Michael Stubbs (born 1961) is a British painter. After completing a Master’s Degree at Goldsmiths’ in 1990, Stubbs started exhibiting internationally in both group and solo exhibitions. He also curated a number of well reviewed exhibitions, inviting artists and curators to collaborate. Between 1999 and 2003 he returned to Goldsmiths to take a PhD in Fine Art; his thesis was entitled Digital Embodiment in Contemporary Abstract Painting. Stubbs is internationally recognised for the unique quality of his paintings, which are constructed by combining abstract configurations of transparent varnishes and opaque household paints with pop art graphic stencils. This layering produces multiple perspectives and optical depths. His contemporary language of abstraction is a play between material manipulation, three-dimensionality and physical space, and this language is formalised into a unique sense of composition and a rich sensual surface texture. As Barry Schawbsky wrote in the exhibition catalogue for Post Flat:New Art from London (2003), ‘Stubbs’s imagery seems constantly on the verge of converging into some form of cultural commentary, but the fundamental abstractness and even irrationality of his overlapping poured shapes seems calculated to prevent that – to insist on the painting as an agreement to disagree between wayward materials and stubborn intentionality’.