I am the Architect, This is not Happening, This is Unacceptable

For the 19th Biennale of Sydney (2014), Henry Coombes presented his work I am the Architect, this is not Happening, this is Unacceptable (2012), which was the result of the artist’s residency at House for an Art Lover, designed in the early twentieth century by Scottish architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh and his artist wife Margaret MacDonald, in Bellahousten Park near Glasgow. Coombes references the social and historical history of the house and park in this film about a heady dispute between a ‘rational’ architect and the ‘irrational’ realm of art.

Shot in black and white and set to an abrasive soundtrack, I am the Architect, this is not Happening, this is Unacceptable is a wild and hypnotic ride. Set inside the mind of an architect, Coombes’s video work portrays the protagonist’s descent from the logical domain of architecture into an emotional and impulsive world of art. Both the architect and the artist are stereotypically portrayed: he with his striped socks and intellectual air, she with her red lipstick and gleeful cackle. Each is constructed in opposition to the other, the clean white modernist lines of his architectural models ultimately being destroyed by the artist’s frenzied and visceral brushstrokes.

London-born and based in Glasgow, Coombes is a particularly British artist. Working in traditional media including oil paint, watercolour, sculpture and film, he examines naturalised assumptions of politics, nature and tradition that are ingrained in British culture – including the historical and mythological narratives surrounding the construct of ‘the artist’.

In particular, Sir Edwin Landseer, Victorian painter and sculptor, has been an important influence throughout Coombes’s career. Landseer gained popular attention among nineteenth-century aristocratic and middle classes for his depictions of wildlife and animals, inspired by the sport of hunting in the Scottish highlands. Coombes’s own watercolour paintings are intentionally naïve, evoking those of Landseer in both style and subject. However, something is amiss in Coombes’s depictions. Benign on the surface, the paintings have a darker undertone; reframing Landseer’s portrayal of the hunting lifestyle to reveal a more surreal and disparaging representation of Britain’s privileged classes.

Landseer appears as the protagonist in Coombes’s film The Bedfords (2009). Here, the artist’s interest in hierarchical differences is explored in the relationship imbalance between an artist and his patron. Like a slightly twisted period drama, The Bedfords reimagines an interaction between Landseer and his patron, the Duke of Bedford, at the Duke’s home in northern Scotland. A string of awkward social situations are played out, highlighting the ingrained differences not only between classes, but between the respectable and the grotesque, town and country, and artist and other.

Coombes graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) from the Glasgow School of Art in 2002. Since then his solo exhibition career has included ‘Henry Coombes’, Kunsthal KAde, Amersfoot (2009); ‘Magic Towards Your Face’, Galerie Jette Rudolph, Berlin (2010); and ‘Henry Coombes’, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2008). Coombes’s work has also been included in the international group exhibitions Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art (2012); ‘Running Time | Artist Films in Scotland: 1960 to Now’, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh (2009); and ‘A Tradition I Do Not Mean To Break’, Zabludowicz Collection, London (2009). Coombes was one of six artists chosen to represent Scotland at the 52nd Venice Biennale (2007).