Jock McFadyen’s London is an eerie place: a derelict sprawl of abandoned buildings, industrial sites and boarded-up shopfronts. His territory is “the edges of the city where it gives away to the landscape”, he says, and paints transitional spaces that are in between uses, or on the way to somewhere else.
Olympia (2015) shows the graffiti-covered hoarding of a Hackney building site, with the Olympic Stadium and Anish Kapoor’s Orbit sculpture just visible above; Cambridge Heath (2004) depicts an empty petrol station against a tumultuous night sky; Elephant (1996) reveals a deserted underground platform, all peeling paint and ominously hanging cables, a no-smoking sign the only hint of habitation.
