The Big Issue
6 August 2001
by Helen Sumpter

A lot of artists combine their art practice with a bit of teaching, curating or writing. But not many, like Martin Maloney, have a go and make a success of them all. Eighteen months after graduating from Goldsmiths College, London, in 1995, he set up Lost In Space, a series of rough-and-ready group shows in his south London flat, in order to promote fellow emerging artists. Three years later his eye for the up-and-coming had lead to the influential, post-YBA, next-generation group show, Die Young Stay Pretty at the ICA.

He finds time to teach art to elderly ladies in Tunbridge Wells as well as to undergrads. He’s written for art magazines and exhibition catalogues, and his own colourfully splodgy, expressive, figurative paintings have appeared in Sensation at the Royal Academy, and at Neurotic Realism and New Labour at the Saatchi Gallery. He’s had solo shows at Robert Prime and Anthony d’Offray in the West End. Next up is Pastoral Paintings showing at Delfina Project Space - four, new, large-scale, vinyl collages depicting groups of people hanging out and having fun in cafes, parks and clubby-looking raves.
"Pastoral paintings are traditionally about lambs and shepherds, and a nostalgic pleasure in the country-side", explains Maloney from his Catford studio. "So in a way these are a contemporary equivalent."

For Maloney this cultural mix of art and the everyday isn’t new. His previous work references Poussin and 17th-century genre paintings, but the people Maloney paints are more often than not based on photos from newspapers and magazines.

Much as he loves art history, Maloney’s equally at home talking about pop music, pop culture and Big Brother. Born in 1961 and brought up on a west London council estate, Maloney’s creative potential was spotted by a secondary school teacher who gave him extra art history lessons and took him to museums.

"I was learning about gems of the Renaissance while everyone else was learning how to use a knife and get into borstal," he says. Unsure about the art career route, Maloney kept up the gallery visits but chose English, not art, for his degree. A subsequent course in printing and publishing and a stint working at a book publishers were enough to convince Maloney that the literary world wasn’t for him, so he took art evening classes, got a portifolio together and went to art college instead.

Having worked with Charles Saatchi, ad guru and art collector, Maloney has also been associated with the former’s reserved and sometimes elusive persona. But whereas both men are probably as passionate about their subject, Maloney is also as passionate about making art accessible, and about promoting it and talking about it.

"It shouldn’t be about making or talking about art in a way that’s pretentious," he explains. "Artists don’t talk in pretentious terms about their work to each other. It should be about making and presenting contemporary art to a wider audience in a way that’s clear and communicable."