Another country

There’s something different about Tai-Shan Schierenberg’s new show at Flowers Central: it has a title, Myths. This may not sound like much — and Schierenberg shrugs it off — but when an artist abandons the neutrality of New Paintings for a title with so much historical baggage you suspect something is afoot. And when you enter the gallery and find paintings of the Black Forest intermingled with his usual English subjects, you can guess what it is.

Despite his name — his mother was Chinese and his father is German — Schierenberg has passed until now for an English painter. A product of St Martin’s and the Slade, since he won first prize in the 1989 John Player Portrait Award at the age of 27, he has been in demand as a portraitist to the British establishment. But one reason for the success of his portraits — apart from his obvious gift for getting a likeness — is the refreshing unEnglishness of his painting style. His figure paintings combine an English reserve with a Sturm-und-Drang style of expressionist brushwork learnt at the knee of his German painter father. And after returning home last winter to the Black Forest, he has produced a series of pine-forest landscapes with mythic titles like ‘Old Europe and Deutschland — The Land of Poets and Thinkers’.

The myth of Germanness is of course artistic territory well trodden by Anselm Kiefer and Gerhard Richter, but Schierenberg is young and foreign enough to have escaped the usual German guilt trip. For him, the trip is a simple journey back to childhood, to an Old Europe that is part of his personal memory. Facing the gallery entrance is a large diptych of a self-portrait head and a pine-forest track titled ‘Heimat’ (Home).