"I Love You So Much That Even When You Are Lying Next To Me I Miss You" Exhibition
The National Arts Club
This event has ended.
Painting never dies. It may be rounded upon with each evolution at the frontline of the artistic landscape but it doesn’t succumb. Interventions, performances and installations explode around it but the convoy of painting rolls determinedly on.
The medium retains the strongest associations with the wider public perception of what art is and this makes working with it perhaps the most difficult path to tread; change is demanded and yet suspected. Painting’s visibility, its cultural history and ubiquitous presence from the glittering bastions of high art to modest private dwellings mean that regardless of education, taste or economic ability most people have an awareness of its function, can own a painting - whether or not it is deemed valuable by the art system - and have an understanding of its raison d’être.
Such universal familiarity both in and out of the contemporary art world casts a searchlight upon those who attempt to convey ideas through the faded glory of paint, for there can be no short cuts to forging a new direction as there may be with newer mediums. Painting has been worked hard; it is everywhere; it often appears exhausted and too often crushed under the weight of its own success. It provides no laurels to rest upon. This ironically places on the frontier not performance, sound or new technology artists but painters. To be seen and heard among the cacophonous furnace of their medium’s legacy they must engage hard and fast at the coal face, for undiscovered seams.
The setting of the National Arts Club for this show is specific. A grand domestic environment stuffed with paintings of yesteryear, sculptures and objet d’art; it is a museum-like curiosity within which time can seem to stand still. Presenting this collection of new paintings here creates a slight tear, a rip in the artistic space-time continuum.
Media
Schedule
from April 15, 2011 to April 29, 2011
Opening Reception on 2011-04-15 from 18:00 to 21:00