Alan Rankle born in 1952 is an artist and curator whose work explores historical, social and environmental issues informed by his interest in the evolution of landscape art. Since his first exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts London in 1973 while still a student at Goldsmiths College, he has worked variously in painting, video, photography, printmaking, architectural intervention and curating, through a series of international exhibitions and commissions.
Retrospective surveys of his work have been presented at Gallery Oldham in 2006 and Fondazione Stelline, Milan in 2010 where he also began his critically acclaimed series of collaborative exhibitions On the Edge of Wrong with the artist Kirsten Reynolds. Recent projects include curating the exhibition Axis: London Milano for Fabbrica del Vapore in Milan with Claudia De Grandi and a prize winning immersive installation Riverside Suites at the Lowry Hotel, Manchester in collaboration with the designer Veronica Givone and AFK Architects.
His work was featured in the 2017 Southampton City Art Gallery exhibition and book, Capture the Castle showing landscape artists from Turner to the present day. 2018 saw the presentation of two major commissions Not Dark Yet for the Grand Hotel in Nuremberg and Prague Suite for Intercontinental in Prague.
Alan Rankle’s works are featured in museum, corporate and private collections worldwide including: Southampton City Art Gallery; Hastings Museum & Art Gallery; Gallery Oldham, Manchester; Bankside Museum, Halifax; The Atkinson Museum; Southport; Museé de Montsegur, France; Fondazione Stelline, Milan; Collezione Vento, Milan; Blackburn Museum & Art Gallery; Stellar Art Foundation, London; Bain Capital, London; PriceWaterhouseCoopers’ London; Marriott Opera, Paris and The House of St. Barnabas Collection, London.
"Rankle's depictions of Nature as luminous, tortured, polluted or damaged, conveyed in violent surges of paint, bold blocks of colour and diffused light make him a distinctive contemporary landscapist."
Jackie Wullschlager, Financial Times, 2007.
"Alan Rankle's paintings engage in the dialogue between the means of art and the sensations before the subject in a particular acute way. He seeks to suspend the painting at that balanced point just before the mark, in all it's expressiveness, dissolves into the illusion of the image."
Roger Woods Art-line International Winter 1993
"His works have a reflective, shimmering quality in which glimpses of trees, ponds, rivers, skies, and other natural imagery, come into focus and then disappear as one gazes at his work. His landscapes are not about simple melodies; they become, like a successful jazz session, infused with a spiritual energy and a barely restrained sexuality."
Laura Stewart Art Quarterly Summer 2000
"Light illuminating and playing on the natural world is what landscape painting is about. But as we know only too well, we are destroying the natural world by changing the chemical composition of the atmosphere. And as the climate changes, so the natural cycles of season, light and vegetation which centuries of landscape painters have recorded change and become unstable. It would not, in my view, be an exaggeration to call Alan Rankle the first painter of climate change."
Laurence Bristow-Smith 'Alan Rankle: The Ken and Irene Hazell Collection' 2014.
"If you go down to the woods today, you might be in for something of a surprise, with dark disturbances insinuating their way through Arcadia’s rolling hills and fertile valleys. At first sight nature stretches out, bucolic, unchanging, idyllic, poetic, but look again at Alan Rankle’s work in his show, Pastoral Collateral, and his urgent messages soon become clear as he brings the past crashing through the now and into the future. Our natural surroundings become secondary, subordinate,collateral."
Judy Parkinson 'Pastoral Collateral' State Media 2016
