Alan Rankle
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Alan Rankle is a British artist, born in Oldham, Lancashire, England in 1952. He studied at Rochdale School of Art (1968–70), and Goldsmiths, University of London (1970–73). He is one of the leading artists of his generation to explore social and environmental issues of the day through Landscape Art. His first exhibition, held at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, was a multi-media performance/installation based on Chaucer's The Pardonner's Tale (1973). Since which time during a thirty year career he has worked primarily as a painter.
Rankle takes as his main subject the development of landscape art as a concept related to changes in attitude to the environment. In some works he treats the entire history of landscape painting almost as a found object; manipulating and cross-referencing styles and techniques from diverse periods and cultures, within a post-modernist fusion of abstract, trompe l'oeil, and figurative imagery. In "Landscapes for the North" Maidstone Museum 1996 he states: "Styles are emblems of the ways we can shift our attention".
