Michael Chance is a painter based in London, roaming around on their narrowboat and working in a studio in Hackney Wick. Their work is a kind of codified auto-biography. Plunging into imaginative and observational approaches to drawing, they surface with images which seem personally meaningful, whilst also resonating with larger political and philosophical themes. A particular preoccupation is the confluence of patriarchal gender norms, capitalism and humanist exceptionalism which underwrites the anthropocene.

Michael is at once horrified and entranced by the emerging effects of climate breakdown and aims to express both a deep anxiety about the future and a glimmer of hope for renewal through dramatic social and political change. Their work has gradually pushed towards a synthetic-cubist language which enables images to overlay and enmesh with slippery, blurred boundaries, to suggest a messy nuanced truth usually disguised by simplistic binaries of male vs female, human vs nature. These paintings sometimes appear to present a whole, almost sculptural form, while being constructed from a confusion of fragments and multi-valent images. In this way, Michael believes that the questioning of their own identity is a tiny part of the necessary re-evaluation that needs to take place in broader society; through confusion will emerge a new form which celebrates simultaneity and paradox.