'Untitled Painting XVI (Herne)'

Marco Pierre White Wheeler’s Threadneedles Hotel, London

Client: Westmont

 

At the Threadneedles Hotel in the City of London Alan Rankle Studio has installed a major painting commissioned by the chef Marco Pierre White for his signature Wheeler’s Oyster Bar and Grill Room.

 

The painting, which at 2.5 x 1.5 metres dominates the room, is based on an earlier work by Alan Rankle from his ‘Running from the House’ series and depicts a stag in a Northern landscape. In the catalogue to the exhibition of the same name Sarah Lloyd quotes Rankle discussing a painting of a fleeing stag which he based on an unknown 19th Century artist’s work in the Musee de la Chasse et le Nature in Paris:

 

‘You see a stag in the forest and in an instant it’s gone, like a phantom.  My paintings are also about how images combine in the mind.  I might be staring at the sea, but thinking about my Mother.  The physicality of paint embodies these ideas, painting can become an emblem of thought and memory as figurative elements disappear and reappear until they hold meaning.  It’s one thing if the stag is running from a hunter, or a forest-fire or a loud noise, but now when nature itself is on the run, this is fear of another order, the stag is running, but the air and trees and snow are also running.’

 

The overall scheme at the restaurant also features the famous suite of iconic photographs of Marco by Bob Carlos Clarke and large scale photographs of game and surreal country house interiors by Roger Hopgood which were particularly chosen to compliment the painting.