Paul Housley exhibition: A Playground in the Factory

From Berlin to Sheffield, artist Paul Housley shows new paintings at Yorkshire Artspace

This Autumn, painter Paul Housley, himself an alumni of Sheffield City Polytechnic (1983-86), is bringing a series of new works to Sheffield's very own art factory, Yorkshire Artspace.

A Playground in the Factory will be Housley's first exhibition in the city for over 20 years. Widely collected and respected, Housley's expressive canvases capture low-key subject matter on a humble scale.

A Playground in the Factory comes hard on the heels of an October show at Bark Berlin Gallery.

Asked about his forthcoming Sheffield exhibition, Paul Housley said: "I was good at two things at school, staring out the window and watching the clock. In actuality, there was a third, drawing, which was a bit like doing both those things at once. Time and daydreaming, work and play, chaos and discipline. These are the things that have shaped my existence.

Art became my way of navigating life. I didn’t want a job but I got a job, I became an Artist, which didn’t seem like a job at all, but ended up an all-consuming project with ridiculous long badly paid hours. From school to art school to studio I built my own factory in my own playground and a lazy boy became a work obsessive, but it had to be my work and my play. Characters, places and memories inhabit the studio, it’s a place of constant flux.

Ideas and motifs, new possibilities and dead ends, the studio contains them all, it’s simply a race against the clock to unearth as many as I can."