There are three aims for this group exhibition which I co-curated with Catherine Loewe; The first is to present the work of four artists whose works operate at the interface of popular culture and aesthetics. The second aim is to present works that all utilise highly seductive visual materials of saturated visual excess. And thirdly, to demonstrate that the finite historical limits of painting are re-presented in the expanded field; painting as reflection of the contemporary moment.

Aesthetic forms and idioms are sought from the cultural landscape of the early 21st century whilst simultaneously being underpinned by an awareness of, and affinity for, the rich repository of British art of the 20th century (eg. the Pop Art collages of Richard Hamilton in the 1950's/60's, assemblages by Kurt Schwitters in the 1940s, to the abstract paintings of Ben Nicholson).

Although framed by the histories of painting these artists aim to avoid descriptive or linear associations. The works examine quotidian contemporary life to provide a critical allegory of both art historical attitudes and the current cultural zeitgeist. They use graphics, representations from online visual information, ready-mades and populist motifs and mix them with pop art in tandem with formal abstract elements.

Pop and abstraction are often represented as historically distinct, a linear progress with Pop’s 1950s/60s graphic utilitarianism being seen to out manouvre abstractions 1940s/50s gestural individualism. But what if the two genres were placed side-by-side? And what if they were combined? Richard Hamilton’s ‘Hers is a lush situation’ (1958) demonstrates his desire in his early works to collide different painting styles with popular motifs and techniques. According to Hal Foster in ‘The First Pop Age’, Hamilton’s early paintings appropriate consumerist design from popular culture. These abstracted fragments of images are employed as a critique of modernist painting and commercial advertising, they are made from ‘a pastiche of different techniques, marks, and signs – painterly, photographic, collaged, abstract, figurative, modernist, commercial.’

In an expanded configuration of forebears such as Hamilton, Morrison, Reigate, Stubbs and Titchner aim to re-frame painting as possibilities of renewal. The digital screen is key. By layering or superimposing images or visual perspectives on top of, or side by side to each other, sometimes with different materials, the screen is mimicked (as with windows programmes). But, unlike the disembodied screen, the artists employ a process based intervention; one physical layered or mapped act follows the previous one to reveal their final compositions.

I presented three paintings as part of this show.

Artists: Barry Reigate, Paul Morrison, Michael Stubbs, Mark Titchner.