ABOUT

Elliot Winspear is a London-based self-taught artist whose work uses camouflage as a means to examine masculinity, identity and the cost of self-concealment in contemporary culture.

Shaped by a childhood immersed in video games, skate culture and streetwear, Winspear’s practice positions camouflage as an emblem of a specific cultural moment: one of fragmentation within male identity, at the intersection of the digital and the real. The same digital world that offers endless distraction and quietly kills ambition has also been the window through which a creative life became possible. Winspear’s work exists in that contradiction, using the tools of a world he is wary of to push against the shyness, self-doubt and low expectation that might otherwise have won.

The surface of all of Winspear’s work is smooth and controlled, giving little away. This is a finish that reflects his temperament as well as his experience working as a painter and decorator. Growing up immersed in working-class British culture and looking at the art world from the outside, Winspear’s instinct was often scepticism, a feeling that much of what was presented as meaningful was anything but. The hard geometric forms, influenced by the clean, flat planes of the digital world Winspear grew up in, maintain a tension against the organic shapes of traditional camouflage. The resulting flatness reflects Winspear’s desire to be understood clearly whilst playing on the irony of doing so using camouflage.