This group exhibition was curated by the artist Paul Morrison. Through an international group of interconnected artists Morrison compiled and collated seemingly different painted practices and contexts around the idea of the colour black and its cultural and social implications. These implications were expected to respond and reflect upon the idea of making paintings in the 2010's.
Kasimir Malevich's black square painting from 1915 acted as a historical precursor. 'Black Square'arguably acted at the time as a 'zero point' of advanced, modernist painting. Whereas Morrison doesn't ally the contemporary works shown with this 'end-game' of painting approach which also resurfaced in the 1980's and early 90's, he instead asks the audience to contemplate Malevich's Russian revolutionary stance to consider overlaps between current artistic, social and political moments in Europe now.
The painting I submitted examines the gap between the world of objecthood and the simulated, virtual world of digital signs. Through making I present this as an imagined relation; a phenomenology of aesthetics which is intended to complement the digital rather than work against it - to recognize the impact that reproducible (non Descartian) digital space has on our understanding of our bodies as sole authors of unique objects. Equally, and at the same time, my paintings seek to cross-over and merge recognized historical genres and methodologies of Art History such as Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art by developing the relation between the bodily and the augmented as an accumulation of temporality, action, colour, form and fragmented popular-cultural signs. These signs eventually become erased and buried within poured, transparent and opaque flat layering and operate as reversible palimpsests; the agency between the intractability of the materials (poured paints and varnishes) and the willful deliberation (of graphically reproducible commercial signs), is intended as a re-staging of the tropes of painterly craft.
Artists: Jan Albers, Ian Anderson, Heliya Badakhshan , Ralf Brög, Glenn Brown, John Chilver, Koen Delaere, Tim Etchells, Saul Fletcher, Neil Gall, Deme Georghiou, Gerard Hemsworth, Gregor Hilderbrandt, Dan Houldsworth, Richard Jacobs, Élise Legal, The Linz Cafe, Caroline McCarthy, Paul Morrison, Jost Münster, Daniel Pettitt, Jan van der Ploeg, Darren Richardson, Bede Robinson, Gary Simmonds, Michael Stubbs, Juliette Sturèse, Riette Wanders, Mathew Weir, Eleanor Wright.
