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British Council Arts
Image: Bronze by Gold. Artist: Richard Hamilton.
Painting
‘Diverse’ is too small a word even to broadly summarise the condition of painting in Britain right now. No longer a question of schools, or successive movements, ‘positions are now multiple, simultaneous and decentred’, to quote Barry Schwabsky.  The high modernist debates between abstraction and figuration have receded into the history of the discipline, and since the last decades of the twentieth century, painting’s status has been considered as just one of many media available to artists, depending on their project. Today, fine art schools in the UK do not necessarily offer painting courses to undergraduates and the international reputation of schools such as Goldsmiths College or Glasgow School of Art who attract increasing numbers of students from overseas, has often been due to their non-hierarchical approach to teaching visual art.

As a consequence, the concerns addressed by painting are as various as those addressed in any medium, and painting has expanded to encompass materials and techniques not previously seen: plastic price tags, embroidery and elephant dung being among the most well-known.  It is now accepted that an artist may move between abstraction and figuration and also equally between painting, photography and three dimensional work, all within a coherent body of work.
Image: Bronze by Gold. Artist: Richard Hamilton.
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British Council Collection
Group Exhibitions
Solo Exhibitions
Venice Biennale
International Biennales
Archived Painting and Drawing Projects
What does the British Council do in this area?
In order to demonstrate contemporary practice in Britain, our exhibitions often present a combination of painting, photography, sculpture, video, sound and text works. Still Life is the latest in a series of exhibitions exploring traditional artistic genres and offers a thematic focus for a diverse selection of work. Micro/Macro is our first major exhibition of contemporary art in Hungary for fifteen years and the works were selected especially for the Kunsthalle Mucsarnok in Budapest. Occasionally we also mount historical exhibitions so have a closer look at our current and archived projects that include painting below.
Supernova
Image: Richard Wright, Untitled Figure 3, 2004Bringing together a group of works by contemporary British artists, Supernova examines new tendencies in geometric abstraction.  Artists included in the exhibition are: Haluk Akakce, Philip Allen, Keith Coventry, Liam Gillick, Gary Hume, Sarah Morris, Dan Norton, Toby Paterson, Tony Swain, Jane and Louise Wilson, John Wood and Paul Harrison, Richard Wright and Toby Ziegler
Archived painting and drawing projects
John Constable Study of the trunk of an elm tree, 1821
Constable in Paris

Major solo exhibition of John Constable, one of the masters of European painting. Selected by one of Britain’s greatest living artists, Lucian Freud.
Search through archived painting projects
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