Michael Chance is a painter based in London, living on a narrowboat and working in a studio in Bow.

Michael studied on the post-graduate programme at the Royal Drawing School in 2012-13 and between 2014-18 co-founded and ran Mercer Chance gallery in Hoxton.

Their work is a kind of codified auto-biography which intersects with larger themes. A particular preoccupation is the confluence of patriarchal gender norms, capitalism, and humanist exceptionalism which underwrites the anthropogenic era. Michael is at once horrified and entranced by the emerging effects of climate breakdown and aims to express both a deep anxiety about the future and a glimmer of hope for renewal through dramatic social and political change. Their work seeks a new language which enables images to overlay and enmesh with slippery, blurred boundaries, to suggest a messy nuanced truth usually disguised by simplistic binaries of male vs female, human vs nature. Working with sculpture and paintings in dialogue, Michael explores new and surprising ways to combine figures and objects; in both disciplines there is a sense of carving into space to discover forms and images from the subconscious. 

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