Artists: Stuart Cumberland, Sean Dawson, Andrea Medjesi-Jones, Michael Stubbs, Dolly Thompsett, Vicky Wright.
(Curated by: Sean Dawson, Andrea Medjesi-Jones, Michael Stubbs)
This group exhibition which I curated with Sean Dawson and Andrea Medjesi-Jones aimed to reflect current cultural and political upheavals whilst simultaneously asking why or how both abstract and figurative painting (which is historically and contextually located) could remain an important reflexive activity in the light of these social changes.
In 2010, given the revolutions in North Africa and the Middle East, rioting and looting on the streets of London, was painting was simply a decadent hedonism by comparison? The curators aimed at promoting a form of resigned detachment as a result of this question. 'Hallogallo' is the title of a track from the Krautrock band Neu from 1972 and it's a knowing play on the German slang word halligalli which means ‘wild partying’ and was intended as an ironic pun.
On the one hand all the paintings presented utilised hallucinatory materials, colours, forms and narratives to convey a sense of worldly displacement - a form of wild partying. On the other, the artists self-consciously deployed these methods as shadows of historical painting styles; they paint the ‘act’ of abstraction and figuration in a knowing, playful and often excessive manner that quotes the carnivalesque parody of law and order (Bakhtin).
