Museum Postcards is an ongoing series of gouache paintings derived from museum shop postcards. Each painting is A6 to keep the scale and framing of the printed object.

The postcard is already a translation: an artwork reduced to something portable and familiar. Painting it by hand makes another version: the image is recognisable but the surface, colour and small irregularities belong to something new.

The series brings together painting, sculpture and photography through the same postcard format from Gerhard Richter’s Lesende and Marcel Duchamp’s readymade Fountain to JAL by Wolfgang Tillmans. I’m interested in how we encounter artworks through reproductions and what changes when a printed souvenir becomes a unique painting.

Chris Coombes is an artist based in Bethnal Green, London.

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