Jock McFadyen RA
Tourist without a Guidebook
5 February - 10 April 2022
Weston Rooms
Tues – Sun: 10am – 6pm
Free, no booking required
Friends of the RA go free
Bringing together 20 works spanning almost 30 years, this free display in the Weston Rooms explores Jock McFadyen’s fascination with London’s changing urban landscapes.
Please note:
• You don’t need a ticket to visit this free display.
• Download our large print guide.
Jock McFadyen's free display features large vistas of London, especially east London, in a state of transformation. Here, the landscape and the built environment morph into one another, with graffiti, litter, peeling posters and shop signs alluding to the city’s inhabitants, whose presence is felt, albeit out of frame.
Across these paintings, buildings take on human characteristics – broken windows, shuttered doors, painterly scars and a sense of faded grandeur hinting at their past lives and occupants.
The display takes its title from an essay by Tom Lubbock, who described McFadyen's approach to painting as, “like a sightseer without a guidebook” – a phrase that struck a chord with McFadyen. "He had perfectly described my attitude to painting places, and since that time I have carried the words close to my heart as I wander about the place not looking for anything.”
#RAJockMcFadyen
Tues – Sun: 10am – 6pm
Free, no booking required
Friends of the RA go free
Gallery
Tate Moss, 2010
Tate Moss depicts an abandoned condemned factory on the site of the future London 2012 Olympics, steel-framed windows broken, blue sky visible through its brick shell and a plastic chair dangling upstairs. The spray-painted slogan ‘Tate Moss’ could be an ironic comment on the intersection of art museums and fashion. The cryptic lettering ‘IDST’ stands for ‘if destroyed still true.’ McFadyen painted this following a
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Olympia 2, 2011
Olympia 2 features two iconic structures of the London 2012 Olympics: the Olympic stadium and the Orbit Tower designed by Sir Anish Kapoor RA, but they are obscured by hoardings adorned with graffiti, one looping red scrawl laconically echoing the shape of the Orbit. Ever alert to changes in the urban environment, McFadyen highlights the multiple competing forces that shape our cities
K.M.B. , 2007-2008
Charlie Chaplin and a companion stick figure stand as ciphers for the human activity evident in the graffiti tags, barbed wire, and fluttering hazard tape caught in a stunted tree. The horizontal bands of (blurred) street and (static) sky lend a cinematic feel to the scene, as if glimpsed from a moving vehicle. The controversial motto ‘Kill Matthew Barney’ is obscured with black paint. Although this painting appears to be a
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Pink Flats, 2006
This local authority housing block enjoyed a view over the Grand Union Canal on the border of Hackney and Shoreditch before luxury new apartments were erected in front of it. Here, McFadyen transposes the pink flats to a new location with a view in the Lea Valley. As McFadyen explains: ‘The figures on the roof are residents who have woken up to an unfamiliar location and have gone to survey where they are.’
Goodfellas, 2001
Goodfellas nightclub stands on the former A13 at Dagenham, occupying a building that was once an art deco cinema, its grandeur much faded. It was presumably named by optimistic proprietors hoping to entice customers by vicarious glamorous association with Martin Scorsese’s 1990 gangster movie. It promises a nightly fantasy escape from the suburban wasteland made apparent by the adjacent parade
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Harvey 2, 2018
Several of McFadyen’s recent nightclub paintings feature ‘Harvey’, a reference to American actor Harvey Keitel, known for his portrayal of morally ambiguous and ‘tough guy’ characters.
Harvey 2 is also a self-portrait, features pressed close to the picture plane, the morbidity of the flesh clearly visible, a red gash on the… 
Bank, 1997
To the casual London Tube traveller there would be ‘nothing to see here’, merely the scruffiness of a brick-lined station tunnel, where posters have been removed. McFadyen, however, finds the painterly possibilities in this palimpsest of urban life. The triptych format is unusual in the artist’s oeuvre; the Brick Lane studio that he was renting at the time was not big enough for a single canvas this size. Scale is important
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From the Greenway 3, 2003
From the Greenway depicts the first office blocks that transformed the Isle of Dogs into the upmarket financial district of Canary Wharf. A sublime sunset glows orange behind the new, artificially illuminated glass skyscrapers, while a brightly lit commuter train crosses the middle distance on the right. The grandeur of nature is matched by the ambition of urban transformation.
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