Ransome stanley biography

Ransome Stanley

Painter,  lives and works in Munich

Born in 1953 in London to a Nigerian father and a German mother, Ransom Stanley grew up in Basel, Switzerland. Stanley studied at the Merz Akademie Stuttgart. In 1979 he obtained a guest studio scholarship at GEDOK Stuttgart. Since 1986, Stanley has lived and worked in Munich in Germany. In 1989 he started working as a freelance artist and a lecturer at the Art Academy in Bad Reichenhall.

Stanley engages with images from the bourgeois culture of the nineteenth century, Western images of Africa, and colonial clichés of exoticism to raise questions about race and identity. He utilises the media in its various forms as an archive, from which he selects and combines imagery. His paintings are often populated with photo-realistic portraits in dialogue with animals, literature, or a picture within a picture.

Glimpses of worn old fences, crumbling walls, and cracked wooden boards create the layering of urban graffiti. Stanley’s scrawled writing and half-torn posters are far from anonymous and spontaneous. The corrosion and deca

Born in London to a Nigerian father and a German mother, Ransome Stanley studied at the Merz Academy in Stuttgart from 1975 to 1979 and soon became a "master student" under Professor Merz. In 1979, he received a guest studio scholarship from GEDOK Stuttgart and since 1986, settled into full- time studio practice. 

 

Stanley's paintings, drawings and sketches function well to illuminate his own identity, which is shaped by two cultures. For Stanley, his process is just as significant as the finished work. Indeed, the assemblage of different forms to create a new whole best describes Stanley's non- linear thinking process in reflecting on colonial clichés of exoticism, images of Africa rooted in Western concepts of rusticness and innocence as well as idioms of 19th-century bourgeois society. 

 

A self-proclaimed "shifter transitioning between two worlds", he creates planar pictorial spaces in a stark narrative painting style, later causing disruptions by contrasting it with the two-dimensional. By adapting familiar motifs, derived from the canons

africanah.org

 

 

Malcolm, 2013.

 

 

 

Ransome Stanley

Artist Biography

Born in 1953 in London, UK. Lives and works in Munich, Germany

Born in London to a Nigerian father and a German mother, Ransome Stanley currently resides in Munich. Drawing from colonial clichés presented in Western culture and idioms of 19th century bourgeois society, Stanley problematises the images of exoticism globally disseminated across the media.

Bang, 2013.

With his panels, Ransome Stanley makes an original contribution to the art historical debate on the “picture within the picture.” The observer is uncertain which spatial plane is being depicted: Are we peering at the little boy with the collar around his neck through an opening in the wall? Is the entire entity a picture hanging on the wall, or are we looking at the reflection of a real person looking into a mirror? As soon as the artist opens up a three dimensional space we can apparently enter, we are thrown back into the two-dimensional plane of the picture. Likewise with the drawing, it is impossi

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