Mary Wintour

In Mary Wintour’s painted collage work the artist predominantly uses paint to edit and fuse together themes. With paint, she brings together images from interior design magazines to create new imagery. As well as this, Wintour imagines locations in which the margins of formal and psychological space are fluid.

Within her body of work, she primarily recognises details of domestic environments and how they can become charged. This ultimately occurs when they are introduced to new contexts. All in all, she uses the resulting discord to generate a departure from familiarity through the medium of painted collage. In largely omitting these spaces’ inhabitants, with this purpose in mind, she explores a tableau of the potential of objects to suggest a narrative.

In many ways, Wintour harks to Richard Hamilton’s painted collage work of the 1960s. Hamilton used consumerist collages as catalogues which, particularly, express the ambivalent spirit of the times. Both Wintour and Hamilton illustrate playful and well observed scenes using a mixture of both collage and painting.

By removing a structure from its original settings, Wintour blurs the lines between the real and the imaginary and invokes a sense of temporality and timelessness that enable a fresh contemplation of the everyday.