Collections Online

Municipal Wall Relief for a Housing Complex in a Parallel Universe 2015-16 is an important work in a series of paintings that emerged from André Stitt’s exploration of the relationship between painting, installation and architecture. Stitt’s practice-based research explored the development of New Towns such as Harlow, Peterlee, Cwmbran and Skelmersdale. These towns – developed as part of post-war reconstruction – aspired to create self-sustaining communities through progressive public-planning and a belief in modernist architecture’s power to improve society.

Stitt’s work engages with the way art, such as the cast-concrete relief sculptures of Willliam Mitchell or Victor Pasmore’s Apollo Pavillion at Peterlee, was embedded into the utopian vision of these New Towns. Municipal Wall Relief is composed of a series of painted wooden panels – small abstracts with surfaces varying from flat acrylic monochromes to controlled painterly gestures in oil. Hung together as an installation, the panels suggest architectural schemes, utopian planning or modernist design. At once decorative, yet off-kilter, slightly disturbing in its variety of approach to mark-making, Municipal Wall Relief has a synthetic, uncanny power that seems as if it has landed from the future or another world.