Destroyed by Shadows [group exhibition]

"After careful consideration, I have come to the conclusion that there is nothing in these paintings that could not be changed, that they can be seen in any light and are not destroyed by the action of shadows." - John Cage on Robert Rauschenberg's, 'White Paintings'. In paraphrasing and inverting John Cage's Zen like ruminations concerning Rauschenberg's early monochromes this show brings together contemporary painters who deliberately ask questions of abstract idioms in painting. In doing so, they bring fresh, inherently visual approaches to the received wisdoms and theories about the destroyed narratives of modernism and post-modernism. By inviting the shadows cast by the social histories of art, politics, non-art materials, digital representations and the bodies performative actions into the realm of abstraction, this show questions the notion that an artwork can simply be a blank receptor for the ever changing vagaries of the day to day or a viewer’s own subjectivity. But vitally, it also challenges the idea that painting's meanings reside purely in the artist's assertion of control and intentions. The selected artists here open up a fraught, fugitive space for painting. Caught between interpretive polarities they explore anxieties about contemporary culture and the shadows of history (and futures) that constantly move over the contemporary picture plane. Injecting collagic processes that force impurity and base materiality into their practice, these artists emphasise the physical properties of the picture surface itself as a constructed or deconstructed surface. They might use the layering of imagery or the physical rupture of the support. Or they might create other interruptions that are cast across the surface as gestural imagery or digital representations. These methods deform notions of the picture plane as a pure abstract space. They ask us to re-imagine painting as a de-centered site of heightened dialectical tensions; an agreement to disagree with paintings historical legacies, where new meanings are always discursively expanded and referentially unstable