Dalwood, D (2015) Washington Crossing the Delaware (2013). In: Painting about Painting, Simmons and Simmons, London, UK, September 2014 - March 2015.
![[img]](/11238/1.haslightboxThumbnailVersion/Screen%20Shot%202018-06-13%20at%2015.45.00.png)
| Item Type: | Exhibition |
|---|---|
| Creators: | Dalwood, D |
| Abstract: | Why painting? Why now? The stratospheric prices recent painting has achieved in the global art marketplace confirm that painting has maintained its presence in contemporary production and its interest and complexity for today’s audiences. Painting seems to have survived the oft-repeated historical arguments – from the ‘paragon’ argument of the Renaissance (which of painting or sculpture was the superior art form), through the ‘death of painting’ fears of the nineteenth century after the inception of photography, to the purported ‘post-medium’ condition of our time. This exhibition does not attempt to bolster support for a medium as such, but it does venture to suggest that work that touches on painting as a practice, either confronting it head-on or looking at it awry, has much to offer those interested in contemporary art. Unlike photography, since the early twentieth century painting has not entertained the need to produce an image with any great resemblance to the observable world. Yet the ubiquity of lens-based images in our digital lives has led not only to an increasingly frenzied pursuit of the visual at large (camera phones, social networks), but lens-based images have become a permanent way of, or even substitute for, seeing. In this sense, seeing itself is less visible – this accounts for part of the pleasure and complexity that painting continues to provide. It is a jolt beyond representation. The work presented here, although centred on artists mostly trained and practising in London, also reflects a global history of Modernist painting of the last hundred years, distributed as it can be now through new technologies, of transport, communication and museum culture. Here we have works that play with traditional association of paint practice – of the rectangle, of colour, of the use of paint, the object, of other paintings, of the finite world contained within the frame. Many of the works selected pay close attention to that which has gone before, regarding both the weight of that history and the demand of Modernism to ‘make it new’, and of our contemporary condition, to ‘make it now… how?’. Contemporary art need not be delivered in easily digestible messages – where the artist is positioned as a childlike entertainer, seeking to find ways of delivering social fascinations in entertainment-focused environments. Much contemporary painting practice lies outside this. So it would seem an opportunity for a corporate collection such as ours, to mount an examination that focuses on the subtle relation between works that are linked not just thematically or with a common material thread, but bound by a shared history of where the artists have studied and practised, developing global art whilst regarding other artists working in their local context. All the works here seem convinced of the state of exception within which painting exists; that painting practice does engaging, sometimes profound things for the artist and for the viewer that other media do not attempt. Contemporary art is invested often in the social or biographical, but whatever else painting attempts to conjure, it also conjures itself. |
| Date: | March 2015 |
| Event Location: | Simmons and Simmons, London, UK |
| Number of Pieces: | 1 |
| Medium: | Painting |
| Subjects: | N Fine Arts > ND Painting |
| Divisions: | Bath School of Art, Film and Media |
| Date Deposited: | 26 Nov 2018 10:33 |
| Last Modified: | 26 Oct 2023 12:29 |
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