A meticulous craftsman, using traditional glazing techniques, which means a painting can take months to finish and steeped in paintings history, McArdle dismantles existing imagery and visual material ,re combing elements to create new pictures of the world. There is a deliberate suggestiveness and provocation to the paintings that result.
In recent years I have become increasingly concerned with the heterogeneous nature of our daily encounters with images — and with the oblique connections that quietly bind them together. In these paintings, I bring together multiple layers of visual experience: glimpses snatched from mediated spaces, fragments lingering from cinema screens, echoes of paintings seen in museums, or carefully composed moments imagined and built up within the canvas itself. Like the flâneur wandering through the city, never following a straight path but drifting between impressions, I do not present a single fixed view; instead I allow images to brush against one another, creating spaces where hidden relationships emerge. The collision and interplay of these elements within the painting provides a way for me to examine how our psychological viewpoints are formed — shaped not just by what we see directly, but by those sideways, glancing encounters that reveal our position within society and culture. The significance of my work lies in this continuing attempt to ground visual experience in a broader understanding of how we inhabit the world, rather than only within traditional art historical aesthetics — an approach that turns the act of looking itself into a kind of wandering, and the painting itself into a place where oblique connections become visible
2000 20/21 The British Art Fair London
2002 Metropolis , Mark Jason Gallery , Bond Street , London
2002 20/21 The British Art Fair , London
2003 Art London, Mark Jason Gallery, Bond Street, London
2003 Focus, Mark Jason Gallery, Bond Street, London
2003 Metropolis 2, Mark Jason Gallery, Bond Street, London
2003 New Contemporaries, Mark Jason Gallery, Bond Street, London
2004 BLUR, Mark Jason Gallery, Bond Street, London
2004 Faces, Mark Jason Gallery, Bond Street, London
2004 New York Art Fair, Mark Jason, London
2004 The Stuckist Punk Victorian, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool
2004 The Stuckists, Lady Lever Gallery, Liverpool
2004 Diverse, Mark Jason Gallery, Bond Street, London
2005 The Stuckist , La Viande Gallery , London
2005 Love and Bullets , Transition Gallery < London
2008 Go West , Spectrum Gallery , London
2018 ‘Stories from The Big Flat Now . Abject Gallery Newcastle upon Tyne
2020 ‘Pause & Punctuate’. GAS Contemporary .
2021 ‘Everyone knows this is nowhere’ NCA Gallery Newcastle upon Tyne
2022 ‘X’ Contemporary British Painting NCA, Gallery Newcastle upon Tyne
Collections
Prudential Life Assurance , London
Standard Chattered Bank , London
Warrander Grant publishing London
Awards and Commissions
Work commission by The Tyne and Wear Development Corporation.
Numerous commissions By Arts Resource , Sunderland
Billboard Commission for the Coalition against Crime (Reproduced on billboards for “The year of Visual Arts.
Publicity
Featured in Arts Review
Recommended in Hot Ticket , London Evening Standard
Recommended in The Guardian art Guide (Weekend)
Interview BBC Radio London
Interview BBC Radio Newcastle
Review in the London Evening Standard
Featured ‘The Crack Magazine’ Newcastle Upon Tyne
Featured Narc Magazine
“Augurs well for the future of British painting” , Arts Review
“ A top draughtsman with a funky fluid style “ London Evening Standard
