FADE AWAY
curated by Alli Sharma
Gallery North
Squires Building,
Sandyford Road,
Northumbria University,
Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 8ST
06 May 2011 - 26 May 2011
Opening: Mon-Thurs 10-5pm, Fri 10-4.30pm
http://gn.northumbria.ac.uk
Fade Away is the first in a series of survey-type exhibitions to be held at Transition Gallery, London and it now travels to Gallery North in May 2011.
This exhibition will feature paintings that oscillate between representation and abstraction. The premise is broad enough, allowing scope whilst providing an interesting visual discourse 'where compositions teeter on the verge of illegibility and images emerge and fade away'.
There will be one work each by a mixture of approx 40 established and emerging artists, limited to 60 x 60 cm.
Barry Schwarbsky (2010) explains:
The fact that many painters today are working along the broad and very porous border between abstraction and images is a sign that this boundary is, in itself, an object of great fascination. It is as if the potential for transition had become more urgent than identification with a fixed position. Mobility trumps rigor. More than in images or abstraction per se, there is a tremendous interest today in what the art historian Dario Gamboni has called potential images, that is, those established in the realm of the virtual by the artist but dependent on the beholder for their realization, and their property is to make the beholder aware either painfully or enjoyably of the active, subjective, nature of seeing, That is, seeing one thing rather than another is not a given; it is a commitment and a form of painting that lays emphasis on this latent state of the image (which is also a latent state of abstraction) is one that throws back on the viewer the question of his or her own choice or predisposition in determining what to see. In particular, the whole phenomenon of painterliness has a different value today than it did in the past. It functions less as a signifier of the individual artist's stylistic signature or as the trace of emotional expression or of the labor of making that would have been concealed by a smoothed-over high finish though it can still be all of those than as a way of allowing the painting to linger in the condition in which things are still unsettled, metamorphic, in transition.
Gallery North is hosting Fade Away as the third part of our series of exhibitions exploring painting studio practice. There will be a free Artist Symposium, book launch and talks by Alli Sharma the Curator and writer Barry Schwabsky at Gallery North on Thursday 26 May 2011.
For enquiries please email azsymposiumgallerynorth@northumbria.ac.uk
The symposium, book launch and talk takes place on Thursday 26 May and is free to attend.
Image:
Laura Lancaster
Untitled, 2010
Oil on Canvas
30.5 x 25 cm
(LL0270)
courtesy of the artist and Workplace Gallery, UK
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