‘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.
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 just one 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 in recent times and the works were selected especially for the Kunsthalle Mucsarnok in Budapest.
