Dexter Dalwood (b. 1960)

"Dexter Dalwood will tell you that he didn't set out to paint history paintings. He set out to acknowledge the impact and ongoing influence of Elvis Presley on the present with a bass player's painting of Graceland. If he were still in a band, he might have suggested they work up a cover of 'Teddy Bear,' maybe in the style of The Stranglers. He was four or five paintings into making imaginary interiors and thinking about a painting of Sharon Tate's living room before he looked around and found himself inadvertently in the heart of the western tradition--painting history paintings. Dalwood's imagination of Graceland, or Wittgenstein's bathroom, or Sharon Tate's bungalow, was but a few steps from Botticellis imagination of The Garden of the Hesperides, from Tiepolo's imagined court of Alexandria, or Caravaggio's imagination of St Matthew in the tavern. Not one of these imagined places is more authentic than any other, and none are disengaged from self-conscious, historicizing"
(D. Hickey, quoted Dexter Dalwood: New Paintings, exh. cat., Beverly Hills, Gagosian Gallery 2002).