Group Exhibition: Ghosts in the Machine, Tension Fine Art, London, UK, 2023

Peter Lamb, Angele Lautier, Marylyn Molisso, Laurence Noga, Michael Stubbs, Ken Turner, Mark Wallinger (curated by Michael Stubbs & Ken Turner) Tension Fine Art asked: What constitutes contemporary abstraction? How do diverse contemporary interpretations affect abstraction? What is abstractions relationship now within the context of its vaunted history? ‘Ghosts in the Machine’ reflects the myriad ways the selected artists are pushing at and exploring the boundaries between old and new media, between our historically rooted modernist, medium-based understanding of painting practice and the contemporary critical discourse that attempts to extend or break it down. If, as art historian Isabel Graw says ".... we conceive painting not as a medium but as a production of signs..." then we see the subjective experience of painting now as complex webs of visual structures, historical references and linguistic turns. In accepting that there is no essential modernist essence of painting, painting’s agency asserts itself as a series of divisions, overlappings, slippages and collisions that foreground an unstable hybridisation of painterly languages and play of historical tropes. The artists in this exhibition give free reign to this new level of visual and conceptual invention synonymous with the legacies of abstract art. By emphasising the physical properties of the picture surface as a constructed or deconstructed space whilst simultaneously re-imagining its possibilities, some of the artists here might use the layering of imagery or the physical rupture of the support. Others might create interruptions that cast the artist's indexical mark or the body’s performative actions against digital representations. Either way, this show asks us to re-imagine the painting surface as a site of referentially unstable, signifying chains that are relentlessly reconfigured and reconstructed with new, exotic and assertive formulations. For this exhibition I chose to exhibit a double panel painting for the first time in a group exhibition. This diptych combination intended to add visual dynamism to the blocks of colour and transparent veils of poured paints which refer the viewer to a restlessly flowing digital realm. This vocabulary is extended through the incorporation of photo images of studio materials into the picture plane to broaden my painting idiom of simultaneous accident and deliberation, code and mark, excess and synthesis