Katie Bell, Ian Bottle, Simon Callery, Jim Lee, Irene Van de Mheen, Guillermo Mora, Jost Münster, Ian Pedigo, Audrey Reynolds, Elodie Seguin
“The choice between the modern and the postmodern is a false one. Both are, and will always be, premature.”
Thierry De Duve
Limber: Spatial Painting Practices investigates why more painters are breaking the pact around flatness as a technical-aesthetic rule of the discipline. By reinventing the encounter with space in and around the work through a constructed three-dimensional materiality, they engage not only with the history of painting but with the increasing dominance of virtual structures and the growing influence of architecture, fashion, and design. The selected artists are drawing on pre-modern and modern ideas to reinvigorate debates around the illusion of depth. By disturbing perspectival representations and thwarting the flatness of the picture plane, they are pushing the ideas that inform modernism – pure painting, pure color, and pure visibility.
Does this response reiterate the limits of abstract painting or revise them through an extension into the three-dimensional? What motivates these artists to push painting so far that it starts to pull, even pull apart, to damage, distort, or disguise the spatial and formal conventions of the medium in ways that defamiliarise the act of seeing and being in relation to the artwork.
Cherry Smith
