Artists: Phil Allen, Peter Ashton Jones, Jake Clark, Richard Clegg, Dan Coombs, Nelson Diplexcito, Nadine Feinson, Mick Finch, Richard Hamilton, Dan Hays, Gavin Lockheart, Andrea Medjesi Jones, David Leeson, Duncan Newton, Sarah Pickstone, Colin Smith, John Stark, Michael Stubbs, James White, Mark Wright.
This group exhibition is curated by artist Mark Wright. It aims to present contemporary painters whose work connects with Pop Art of the 1960’s, and particularly the legacy of the important British artist Richard Hamilton who was included in the exhibition.
These painters have an acute awareness of their predecessors including other seminal contemporary artists such as Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke. In his recent book, 'The First Pop Age', Hal Foster discusses imagery in the work of Hamilton, Richter and others through distinctive frames of reference, including the tabular, clichéd, distressed, photogenic and deadpan image. The aim is to explore if it possible to take elements of this template and apply it in varying degrees to the painters in Dirty Pop and to demonstrate how painting has a capacity to return to key historical ideas and yet reinvent itself by finding new painting but also popular cultural associations.
Equally, the show allows the viewer to identify themes and ideas in play across the various artists’ work as well as highlighting their differences. This is perhaps most apparent through the handling of materials, the stuff that goes into making a painting. Paint records traces and gestures that represent many visual qualities from representation through to expression and it is this central tenement of historical western painting that is presented as a threefold activity; a question, a quotation and an expanded understanding of self-reflexive expression.
