This publication accompanies the artist’s solo exhibition Stage at mac Birmingham (26 September – 22 November 2015).

Paul Newman is concerned with painting in its broadest sense.  From the raw materials and tools, to the subject and techniques, through to the act of making a painting in the artist’s studio and its subsequent display in the gallery or in the book, his work explores the processes and residues of a medium that is richly and complexly layered throughout history.

Newman’s Stage alludes to the artist’s studio, a site of performance, or a set inhabited by invented characters and their respective narratives. For Newman the studio is not purely an apparatus for making the work, and the stage is not only a platform for presenting it; these two arenas converge to form the work itself.