SATURATION | New Spanish Painting
In an image-saturated age, digital media, internet, television, film, and video entertain, inform and surround us every waking hour. Hand-held technologies have made us not only incessant consumers but also constant maker/editors of images. The artistic value of the painted image has been in crisis for a century and particularly in recent decades, painting has been relegated to the periphery of contemporary art discourse. Amidst numerous and expanding media and visual technology, what is the role of painting now?
SATURATION looks at the persistence of painting in contemporary artistic production. Coinciding with the 100th anniversary of Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square, SATURATION explores the range, methods and means of painting production today through the work of seventeen Spanish painters in three simultaneous London exhibitions.
23 June – 31 July 2015
Monday – Friday 10 – 6 pm Saturday 10 – 5 pm
The Fitzrovia Gallery 139 Whitfield St London W1T 5EN
+44 (0)20 7209 9107
FIGURE/GROUND
S/T ( Los Diablos) Santiago Ydañez 2010
A Trace of Transition Pepa Prieto 2014
ROSANA ANTOL ANA BARRIGA GLORIA CEBALLOS VICTORIA IRANZO
KEKE VILABELDA RUTH MORÁN PEPA PRIETO SANTIAGO YDAÑEZ
Figure/Ground explores readings of narrative and sub-narrative in works on canvas, paper, acrylic, and concrete. Drawing on techniques from film and photography, painters re-assemble appropriated imagery to overlay and alter associations, spatial and narrative hierarchies and meaning. Cut-and-paste, collage, scale distortions, photographic transfers and animation and video become tools for destabilising painting conventions and introducing fluidity and ambiguity to the medium.
What is foreground, what background? Is the viewer witness to the depicted event or a party to the act of witnessing itself? This reading of figuration elides such distinctions, offering both and neither. These borrowed images are neither stable nor steal- able. The fact of paint on a ground stands for itself alone.
16 July – 12 September 2015
Wednesday – Saturday 12 – 6pm and by appointment at any time
COPPERFIELD 6 Copperfield St London SE1 0EP
07845 594549
ADD SUBRACT DIVIDE
Mitad tú, mitad yo (Pedro) Guillermo Mora 2015
GUILLERMO MORA MARÍA ACUYO LOIS PATIÑO RUBÉN GUERRERO
SONIA NAVARRO ALAIN URRUTIA
Add Subtract Divide sees artists revisit the abstract painting tradition with new media, processes and experimentation. Some works take physical issue with the discipline by disassembling or reconfiguring canvas and stretcher, preferencing material qualities over any notion of the picture plane. The historical reading of flatness in the language of Modernist geometric painting is investigated using trompe l’oeil and collage, flickering between picture plane and referent. Other works experiment with scale and non-traditional materials to re-position otherwise familiar forms, investing them with political or gender narratives; Geometric abstraction is reworked in stitched lines and layers of applied felt, transforming the medium and linking it to other traditions of making.
17 July – 12 September 2015
Wednesday – Saturday 12 -6pm and by appointment
The RYDER Projects 19a Herald St London E2 6JT
07719 110821
PERFORMED PAINTING
Ferran Gisbert wields a handmade paintbrush corresponding to his own height
ALAN SASTRE VICKY USLÉ FERRÁN GISBERT ROSANA ANTOLÍ
Performed Painting explores the act and re-enactment of painting whether directly on the gallery wall or abstracted into video or film. Physical and visual limits are probed and tools or technologies deployed to extend the artist’s reach, expand the extent of a brushstroke or amplify the colour spectrum visible to the human eye. The image can resemble a movement-map for the eye to wander over and revisit, trailing the artist’s hand. This is action painting – or an idea of action painting – we can no longer be certain.
Sponsor Acción Cutural Española
ARTES 