Andrew Graham-Dixon, ‘The Golden Years; Goldsmiths Art Graduates’, Vogue, September 1990

Michael Stubbs, still a student on the MA course at Goldsmiths’, paints knowing parodies of high modernism, using the elevated language of late twentieth-century abstraction – Robert Ryman, Jasper Johns – to make pictures that look, oddly, like overdecorated wedding cakes. Stubbs’ paintings are meant, he says, to be “funny and serious at the same time”. They are tongue-in-cheek literalisations of the art object as, literally, a consumable. Yet they are also, he says, “very traditional in a way. I’m interested in paint, its sensuousness, its handling – extremely old concerns”.