Alan Rankle
Alan Rankle was born in Oldham, Lancashire in 1952. He studied at Rochdale College of Art, Goldsmiths' College, University of London, and The Liu Academy of Traditional Chinese Arts. From his first exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts London in 1973, he has worked variously in installation, painting, printmaking, video and photography. A major series of paintings Riverfall first shown at Southampton City Art Gallery in 1993, brought his work to a wider public.
He has remained at the forefront of artists expanding the vocabulary of contemporary painting, and contributing to the enduring relevance of Landscape Art in the light of environmental issues of the day. His work is featured in public and private collections worldwide.
"His works have a reflective, shimmering quality in which glimpses of trees, ponds, rivers, skies, and other natural imagery seem to come into focus and then disappear as one gazes at his work. His landscapes are not about simple melodies; they become, like a successful jazz session, infused with spiritual energy and a barely restrained sexuality."
Laura Stewart Art Quarterly
"Rankle's depiction of Nature as luminous, tortured, polluted or damaged, conveyed in violent surges of paint, bold blocks of colour and diffused light make him a distinctive contemporary landscapist."
Jackie Wullschlager
Financial Times
"Alan Rankle's paintings engage in the dialectic between the means of art and the sensations before the subject in a particularly acute way. He seeks to suspend the painting at that balanced point just before the mark, in all its expressiveness, dissolves into the illusion of the image.” “Landscape has always demanded abstraction because its overwhelming complexity and scale necessitate generalisation, and this is as true of Ruisdael or Poussin as much as De Kooning. Rankle is fully aware of this, and exploits all the historical possibilities of the landscape tradition by entering into a complex dialogue with the representational codes of landscape art from several periods and cultures." Roger Woods Art Line International