Richard Baker: Anticipation of Memory

We choose furniture in anticipation of the life we'll live around it. We picture where the sideboard will stand, the books and photographs we'll place, the morning coffee and evening drink we'll put on it. We take our measurements in the empty space, and imagine, before it has happened, the memory we're about to make. Richard Baker paints this same anticipation, one step removed. Anticipation of Memory brings together paintings made over the past decade, each one a way of owning something before, or instead of, having it. Baker began this body of work after moving house, newly preoccupied by trawling websites in search of furniture. He was struck by the strangeness of the eBay listing photos he found - chairs dragged into gardens or sideboards squashed into hallways for a hurried photo - drawn to their makeshift, accidental compositions. Painting them became a way of possessing what he couldn't buy or no longer had space for.