The Poets Elbow exists mainly in the mind of the Artist. It is a place of refuge and contemplation. Entrance and membership is free but few will pay the price.

It is a place for daydreamers, idealists and romantics. It’s a place of eternal optimism and impossible odds. In the mind of the Artist it could be a pub, but it could just as easily be a gallery or a museum, a library or a lonely walk.
The work begins in the Poets Elbow and that’s where it will also end.
— An imaginary pub made of shadows, glimpses and dust.

Paul Housley, February 2020

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Belmacz is delighted to announce a new solo exhibition, comprising several large-scale works by London-based artist Paul Housley.

Housley recently became the proprietor of The Poets Elbow, a fictitious pub where the artist feels at home. Within this familiar setting, we are introduced to the regulars who cross the threshold. Coupling the fruits of a fierce imagination with adaptations from the canon of art history, Housley invites us to reflect on our interior worlds with vivid portrayals of various human conditions in correlation with the states of intimacy, violence and contemplation. Repeated reinterpretations of particular motifs continue to haunt his work and inhabit our subconscious.

The exhibition reflects on the phenomenon of lucidity merging with fatality as we confront our helplessness in a ‘local’ full of promise.

The Poets Elbow also takes the form of a book of sketches, published to coincide with the exhibition. It is available to purchase in our online shop

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Paul Housley (b. 1964, Stalybridge, UK) Fine Art BA, Sheffield City Polytechnic & Painting MA, Royal College of Art. Recent exhibitions include Slow Painting, curated by Martin Herbert for Hayward Touring; The Player Becomes the Game, Monte Clark Gallery,Vancouver (2019) and Dice. Apple. Knife duo exhibition with Joel Tomlin, Sothebys, Stockholm (2018).