Will Teather

About The Artist

Will Teather is well-known for creating artworks that combine an unusual imagination with a mastery of traditional skills. The artist's paintings often depict curious characters caught up in extraordinary situations.

Will Teather’s The Vast and Unknowable Universe,
was at The Cut, January/February, 2014.

A survey of selected artworks from the last 5 years, including a number of major new paintings being exhibited for the first time.

British artist Will Teather has received international recognition for his powerful images that combine a unique imagination with a mastery of traditional skills.

The artist’s paintings and drawings often depict curious characters caught up in extraordinary situations.

Lifting motifs from diverse sources such as Flemish still life, baroque art and Weimar painters, the artist enters into direct conversation with the history of painting with the aim of bringing some new ideas to the table.

After spending his childhood in rural Norfolk surrounded by religious imagery and books on historical painting, Teather’s knowledge of contemporary art was refined through periods of study in London at Central St Martins and Chelsea College of Art & Design.

The artist’s skill as a painter, however, remains largely self-taught through personal experimentation and his close inspection of masterpieces from major museums.

The ideas explored in the artist’s work over recent years were influenced by his summer residency in Northern Scotland in 2007, where he had a painting studio within a functioning theatre.

In Teather’s own words:
“In the spirit of magical-realist fiction, the storytelling explores the indefinite space between reality and fiction, horror and humour, fantasy and fact. Vaudevillian characters inhabit a play without beginning or end, where carnival and folk traditions are pastiched together into simulacrum and spectacle. As with Angela Carter’s novels, the carnivalesque elements of transgression and excess allow illusion to work and the improbable to become possible.”