Paul Lemmon has announced details of a new major solo show at the Herbert Art Gallery & Museum in Coventry.

Through the Screen sees Paul interrogate our relationship with the online realm, from social media and screen exposure to wider internet culture and the promises of algorithms.

All based on digital videos of film, TV and social media, which Lemmon disrupts and remixes, more than 40 handmade paintings foreground the illusory effects, and shapeshifting qualities of the internet and screen culture to shape the exhibition.

The show begins with a series of 10 oil paintings of various sizes for which the artist downloaded and corrupted YouTube footage for his source material. Within these fragmented compositions, defined by their digital collage aesthetic, can be glimpsed the phantoms of individuals speaking to camera.

In this series, the artist has investigated the experiences of people communicating through a screen. As he explains: “It seems like it’s connecting us but, really, forms a barrier. It’s not possible, for instance, to look someone in the eye when we talk tothem through a camera on Zoom. The screen creates disconnection, and the disrupted video effect serves as an analogue for this feeling.”

The glitch dynamic also acts, in the artist’s words, “as a metaphor for the masks we wear, and personas we assume for social media, as if splintering and fracturing our personality.”

As well as depicting anonymous figures, Lemmon has turned his attention to the historical faces of cultural icons like Richard Nixon, and pop stars such as Madonna and Debbie Harry.

Among the show’s highlights and the largest on display, Beyond the beyond (2024) is a powerful example of the abstracted works Lemmon calls ‘cyberscapes’. The source material for this painting was David Bowie’s ‘Life on Mars?’ promo, which the artist has distorted beyond recognition. If viewers stare long enough, they might just discern the singer emerging from the patchwork surface. Bowie also appears across 6 more paintings, part of another series from a special New Year 1979 performance of Space Oddity.

“What I paint is only possible because of the internet, computers, and the algorithms which compress videos so they can be transmitted to your phone. Yet, the promise and allure of this technology can end up devaluing real-life things, including the physical act of painting and the human endeavour that goes into it.” Paul explains.

“By disrupting the computer’s own processes for my compositions, I’m using technology in way that it’s not supposed to be used, and that’s art. I’m travelling into the screen and returning with what I find there. With oil paint I’m taking the digital, immaterial and making it real again, to give the viewer the pleasure of reality. My message for viewers is to stay with real life as much as possible.”

Paul Lemmon: Through the Screen comes to Herbert Art Gallery & Museum from Wed 4 Feb – Sat 15 Feb.