The century flows through the show like an underground river. Egon Schiele sets up his drawing box in the office of a prisoner of war camp in 1916. Ten years later, Brancusi is labouring through the dark night in his Paris attic. In films, photographs and paintings, the studio edges in at every turn. It is a place of cigarette butts and congealing palettes, the masking tape running out as the daylight fades too fast and the leg of the drawing table needs propping yet again. It is a place where the clock ticks with reproachful violence as no work gets done in Darren Almond’s live feed of his studio. Where the canvases are still worryingly bare, in an exquisite tempera painting by Andrew Grassie (perfect paradox). Or the paintings have all gone, along with the students, in Paul Winstanley’s paintings of deserted art schools, haunted by telltale hints of colours the decorators have tried to cover over with whitewash.

There is a clear affinity between the work of Paul Winstanley and Pieter Saenredam, a painter who flourished during the Dutch Golden Age in the 17th century. It has been suggested that he was motivated more by his passion for architecture than by his faith. Whatever his motivation, these qualities give his work a startlingly modern appearance when you encounter it in its art historical context in galleries. You can see its appeal for Winstanley, who has long pursued a form of painting that incorporates aspects of both photographic representation and minimalism. The key work in his new show at the Kerlin is his recreation, or re-imagination, of a lost painting of Mariakerk by Saenredam. Winstanley set about approximating it by referring to a surviving, precise preparatory sketch.

British artist Paul Winstanley’s “Art School” paintings, now on view at the Mitchell-Innes & Nash gallery in Manhattan, take their inspiration from his own photographs of art-student studios left empty for the summer months. Though imitative of photographs, these delicately realist works are full of painterly depth and texture. Plush grays and downy whites lend the scenes a soft, comfortable, well-worn feeling; the studios are empty and bare, monastic even, but never austere. Signs of craft and toil mark the floors, walls, tables, and chairs. In one piece, a bright orange surface—wall or canvas?—is so close it is almost menacing, an explosion of energy cutting off our view of the serene studio beyond. Through July 19 at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, 534 West 24th Street, New York.

Paintings based on photographs often deaden the vivacity of the original image. But British artist Paul Winstanley proves that this needn't be the case. 

Paul Winstanley photorealistically paints nondescript places and anonymous figures—usually looking out of the picture and away from the viewer—in a soft-focus manner la Gerhard Richter.

For the past three decades, British artist Paul Winstanley has been painting the future past--that utopian architectural imaginary of the postwar years concretized in a range of quasi-public/quasi-private milieus, from the airport to the hospital--making only the most incremental variations in his address of the subject matter from one show to the next. 

The Vermeer of corporate interiors, Winstanley is back with his first New York show in more than a decade, a quiet octet of oils on linen. Recurring subjects include a floor-to-ceiling glass wall, curtained with translucent panels through which trees glimmer, and a chrome walkway lit by pearly fluorescent fixtures.

Known for his paintings based on photographs of uninhabited interiors and landscapes, British painter Paul Winstanley has been doing basically the same thing for a long time.