RICHARD Barnes, Kate Young and Tim Morrison deliver “very different responses to the previously presumed monolithic beauty of York” at According To McGee from today.

“York: ReMastered promises an exciting balance between York’s baroque bombast and its more fluid, feminine sense of fun,” effuses the Tower Street gallery co-owner, Greg McGee. “Here, Technicolor is the new black.”

Richard Barnes considers the show to be interesting because it brings together three artists with different approaches to recording reality. “Painting is all about decision-making and these three varied styles really illuminate this,” he says. “One thing that underlies York: ReMastered is how we abstract reality through the process of drawing.”

Richard flexes his acrylic-flecked biceps at McGee’s behest every year. “Summer wouldn’t be summer without his instantly thrilling paintings in our window,” says Greg. “As ever, York’s baroque bombast is his muse and, as ever, he endows the city with his unique vision, his hotly slobbered oil paintings reflecting the breathless, bristling magic of the Minster and its surrounding streets “Richard has hit a real rich seam this time, and as gallery curators, we’re grateful to see his groove deepen, his style thicken.”

Kate Young made her McGee debut in 2008 when she was given the chance to show new work after a 20-year hiatus. “Three years, five exhibitions and six commissions later, I’m able to exhibit alongside two artists of great note,” she says. “My work has developed with my confidence and I hope to continue painting when I return to supply teaching in September. There are still many Yorkshire views I’m yet to discover.”

Kate has “always been a favourite” among Greg’s roster of artists. “Her depictions of Yorkshire remind me of a good Tintin book. What’s not to love?” says Greg. “What she has in common with Richard Barnes is that they both stick to their visions without diffusing the painting.

“You see one of their pieces in a window or someone’s living room and you think, even if you don’t know their names, ‘that’s that artist who shows at According To McGee’. There’s an iconic quality about their work that complements each other.”

Kate’s boldness in her painting style continues to impress Greg. “She takes York and other locations and endows them with a Julian Opie crispness,” he says.

“York, with its ornate buildings, generates a lot of traditional art, sometimes fine art, sometimes art that is a little sweet, and often not very well painted. York’s trad artists are at times guilty of over-reverence for the city’s charisma and are squeamish about meddling with its modern potential, but too much respect can boil the fun out of art. It’s the same as, say, Noel Gallagher plucking with a pedestrian frown at his guitar strings. For true finesse you need a dose of Kate’s derring-do.”

Greg describes Tim Morrison as a charming, graceful artist and a searcher, whose experimental work deconstructs a street scene and harnesses a new beauty it otherwise would not have.

Black ink and thick acrylic are trademarks, although Tim is moving towards collage and assemblage, using fragments of maps, lettering and drawing in works of disorientating energy that reveal his fascination with surrealist Kurt Schwitters’ Hanover abode.

“It doesn’t exist anymore – it was bombed in the war and the sculptures were obliterated – but in my drawings I inserts depictions of the Hanover house inside the drawings of houses in York,” says Tim.

As Greg puts it: “Tim does things his own way, and in that way we thought we should get him on board for this show. What we’ve found is that artists who try to second guess what art lovers and collectors appreciate usually end up with moribund work.

“Tim’s work is slippery, spiky, unforgettable stuff. It’s perhaps darker than Barnes and Young’s, perhaps a little more urban, but the tug and pull of these three artists, the synergy, the sweet-and-sour aspect of it, ensures the painterly future of York’s portraits is in good hands.”

Greg sees this month’s exhibition as a statement of intent by his gallery. “The worst thing to do at this stage of our career, in this summer of financial uncertainty, is to lose our nerve and go for diluted, neutered watercolours,” he says. “We want well painted, well-crafted vividness, paintings that celebrate painting.”

• York: ReMastered will open this evening with a private view from 6pm to 9pm and will run until August 21.


Only one question for...

York: ReMastered artist Tim Morrison

What are the principal inspirations for your work at present, Tim?

“I’ve always been fascinated by artists’ addresses and telephone numbers. An early student work was a large board I found on a skip which I covered with neatly stencilled Parisian artists’ telephone numbers culled from a directory.

“The German artist Kurt Schwitters has long been an inspiration, which has risen to the surface recently when I found an old black-and-white photo of the house in the suburbs of Hanover in which he created his famous Merzbau over two decades.

“An unassuming facade hid what has been referred to as the 20th century’s greatest lost masterpiece: a huge slowly evolving ‘sculpture/environment’ made out of found materials, which rose up from the basement through the floors and apparently poked out through the roof. It’s lost because it was bombed to smithereens by the RAF in 1943, when the sculptures were obliterated, so it only survives in beautiful photographs. I started doing small ink drawings of a ruined house – also based on a photo of Schwitters’ ruined home after the war – but with my own still lives of cups and people rising up inside.

“Added to that, I love the corner of Gillygate and Bootham in York and have drawn it from observation for a number of years. In my recent work I’ve incorporated these real and familiar facades with imagined ‘installations’ or ‘re-locations’ of other buildings I’m interested in or have memories of: a decaying building I saw in East Berlin which I drew 20 years ago, Schwitters’ house in Hanover etc. I fantasised that York could host an International Festival of Re-Installed Buildings.”

“I’m also interested in the fact that a sizeable number of people throughout the UK have converted their lofts and attics into cinemas, another concept I’ve popped into my work.”