Since completing his MA at MMU, Andrew Bracey has continued to make conventional abstract paintings and mixed media, painting based installations. He refers to all of these aspects of his practice as being painting and is adamant that he is a painter first and foremost, not simply an artist. His work has been driven by a concern for the basic language and historical precedents of modernist abstract painting, especially the quintessential pictorial effects associated with the interaction of mark/dot with colour as pattern.

Bracey's contribution to this exhibition is made up of a number of apparently hand drawn spots which have been digitally reproduced. These elements are then arranged on the glazed surface of a window so that attention is drawn to their presence as quasi pictorial elements and structures within the physical and cultural features of the site. But going further, the reference to painting as process is extended to painting as object, where the framing structure of the windows reference the wooden grid on the reverse of a traditional canvas stretcher. We are effectively denied access to the conventional viewing position for the resulting 'painting', which is only discernible from the distant roof of Manchester Town Hall . His obfuscation is deliberate and provocative. It draws attention to the ontological questioning which pervades a great deal of recent abstract painting but is position by, and located within, an explicitly public space. This has clearly been a strategic curatorial decision. Bracey's work acts as a point of entry into the show- as both physical site and discursive space – and as a moment of iteration or maybe reinforcement, as the exit point.

What Bracey's work demonstrates in a metonymic manner, is the way in which an expanded field of painting works literally outside of the materialist frame of the work, and repositions the making of the work, as a cognitive act within the viewing space.