Tarantula focuses on John Bunkers ongoing commitment to producing large scale collages and assemblages. These works highlight his ambitions for the medium of collage and through them Bunker creates a very singular and original exploration of the protean possibilities of abstract art now. "John Bunker's work is situated at the nexus of complex interactions between modernism, abstraction and realism. It is a body of work that affirms my belief that abstract art must, at its core, if it is worthy of our interest, strengthen and reaffirm our relation to the world not retreat from it. The world that it addresses is characterised by extreme and rapid transformation, in which, as Karl Marx had it, "...all fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all the new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify". In such a world it is, I believe, ever more incumbent upon artists to invent languages, strategies, and forms by which to communicate a coherent understanding. John Bunker's work does this by extending a dialogue with the wider history of 20th and 21st century art, but also -crucially- with the social and material world in which he lives. He rejects both the self-serving autonomy of much of the the modernist canon and theoretical navel-gazing of so much of what has followed. [....] The language in which John Bunker's work speaks is neither private, nor esoteric. It is, rather, historically rooted and mediating- and generative of beautiful results. It's beauty is not escapist or soothing, but rather stands within Chernyshevsky's definition: 'Beautiful is an object that expresses life or reminds us of it'." Ben Wiedel-Kaufmann.
