Alex Crocker

64pp

Window Pane is Alex Crocker's first monograph, marking a year spent at Manchester School of Art as the Freelands Fellow in Painting. Throughout this concentrated period, while isolating occurrences from his daily life and filtering them through painting, Crocker became less concerned with the idea of a one-shot approach, instead exploring a return to thinking of painting as slowly accumulated layers; scuffed impasto and congealed blobs rubbing up against transparent passages of liquid glaze.

This deeper material engagement connects with the potential for painting to operate as something that holds its intrinsic quality, to be both pigment on surface as well as illusory space. We might think of painting as equivalent to the windowpane, simultaneously plane and portal. Designed by Harry Meadley this full colour, hard back book brings together paintings and works on paper alongside an essay by Nicholas Hatfull whose art criticism has appeared in periodicals such as Frieze, Mousse and Apollo.