Mark Metcalfe

Mark Metcalfe is an artist, writer and tutor living and working in London.
He is in the process of completing a major volume of poetry and has written extensively on Kabbalah and the Western Tradition, and has spent two decades studying Transpersonal Psychology and Mysticism.
The Banal Lapses of Heroes is a body of paintings, Drawings, prints and sculpture that operates something akin to a reconstruction or reinterpretation of existing stories, characters or events that already sit in the collective memory, drawn from somewhere in time and yet outside temporal space.

By working through archetypal forms, characters emerge that challenge fixed ideas about trust, faith and the unknown. Totemic of a deep drive to externalise hidden things through characterisation and a preoccupation with memory and nostalgia, an image can posit a peculiar melancholy or sense of the uncanny, by memorialization of archetypal heroes, tricksters and bizarre phenomena.

Education
2009 MA Visual Arts (Printmaking), University of the Arts, London (Camberwell)

2008 BA (Hons) Fine Art, London Metropolitan University (First Class)

Awards & Prizes
Nominated for Goldener Kentaur, European Art Award
Artichoke Printmakers Award
John Purcell Paper Award
Owen Rowley Award 1st Prize
Sir John Cass Purchase Prize

Exhibitions & Research

Cloud 9,
ad Lib Gallery, Chelsea
Everyday is a Miracle
Ad Lib Gallery, Chelsea, London
2019
Art Below, Old Brompton Gallery, Chelsea, London.
​Themselves, Warehouse Festival, Copeland Road, Peckham, London.
Art Below, Herrick Gallery, Mayfair, London
Unmissable, The Other Art Fair, Truman Brewery, London
2018 Voids Rage Chimera Bloom (Two Person Show) A Side B Side Gallery,
Mare Street, Hackney, London.
2017 In Vista & An American Anima (Two Person Show) Anna Lovely Gallery,
140 Sydenham Road, London.
2012/16 Research on Early European Kabbalah, Toledo, Spain
2010/11 Modern Masterpieces (two Person Show), Fire Station Arts Centre, Windsor, Berks.
Slip the Souls Silk with Offerings, (One Person Show), Turner & Thom gallery, Eton High Street, Eton, Berks.
Taming the Wolf of Gubbio, In collaboration with Emma Somerset Davis, Ace & Lion Gallery, Islington, London.
Open Studio, Blue Anchor Lane, Bermondsey, London
1916, In collaboration with Emma Somerset Davis, Triangle Space, Chelsea, London.
2009 In ...