Stephen Snoddy, Looking Out consists of approximately fifty paintings in acrylic, gouache, monotype, and watercolour on paper mounted on blockboard. The exhibition is accompanied by a 98-page illustrated catalogue, featuring an essay by Richard Cork, the innovative British art historian, author, broadcaster, critic, and curator. Stephen Snoddy was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in 1959. He lives and works in Manchester. Snoddy graduated from the Belfast School of Art. Despite his undeniable artistic talent, for twenty years, Snoddy has pursued a career as Director of important British museums and contemporary art centres: the BALTIC in Gateshead, where he was the Founding Director; Milton Keynes Gallery; Southampton City Art Gallery; and The New Art Gallery Walsall. In 2012, inspired by the discovery of sixty-four monoprints, which he had created thirty years earlier, Snoddy assiduously resumed his artistic activity. Snoddy is stimulated by a passion for pictorial renewal: he incessantly seeks new shapes and structures to enrich the language of abstract painting. Particularly fascinated by the work of Henri Matisse and Richard Diebenkorn, as well as the Minimalism of Brice Marden and Mark Rothko, Snoddy invites us to consider structure as the absolute key to contemplate visual art. His compositions are determined by a high standard of exactingness in what is a complex conceptual process ? one that must be, neither purely formal, nor totally accidental. The painting must evolve naturally, organically, and by subtle gestural mastery. Snoddy?s paintings ? although mostly modest in format ? nevertheless possess great breath. By using layers of paint to create pentimento, he applies delicate glazes, thus avoiding impasto, and resulting in exceptionally lyrical surfaces. Divulging a passionate and yet methodical will to play on permutations of lines and geometric shapes, Snoddy?s paintings thus generate multiple possibilities. Alternating between vertical and horizontal compositions, the artist invites the viewer to observe the relationship between his canvases and discern the slight variations from one to the other. Snoddy?s paintings work as polyptychs and series, according to specific architectural structures and clearly defined colour schemes. Fascinated by architecture, Stephen Snoddy meticulously treats proportions and the disposition of pictorial elements. The finished work springs from an intelligent balance between line, shape and space.