The indiscipline of painting.

The indiscipline of painting: International abstraction from the 1960’s to now.
Tate St Ives, 8 October 2011 - 3 January 2012

I visited this exhibition whilst on a trip to Cornwall last year. Curated by Daniel Sturgis, the exhibition focused on the visual and conceptual connections between works rather than on chronology or a specific theme. The comprised works of 49 British, European and American artists, show the innovation and diversity abstract art can have. I also found that it highlighted a variety of applications for painting in contemporary art and design.

Most of the paintings were made by hand in a controlled or orderly way, using the media itself to represent or portray meanings and ideas, where few of them displayed a gestural or self expressive handling of paint. The paintings throughout the exhibition might have initially come across as having no relevance to one another at all, but each piece of work had its own context and language of abstraction. Even without knowing anything at first glance, you could still find them visually intriguing.

‘Electronic surveillance’ (1989) by Tim Head. Contemporary artist using pattern to obscure rather than decorate, interested in hyper real codes and languages, this piece is a recreation of the pattern taken from the inside of a payslip envelope, magnified onto a large canvas, and is something miniscule and innocuous that everyone comes across once a month.

‘Chronochrome set 3’ (2010) by Cheney Thompson is a technologic abstraction, painting process where he records the amount of light coming into a space, which is then composed using a certain colour theory, ordering the light into individual formatted dates on a calendar. The idea of visually representing a record of light, monitoring data over a period of time interested me in this piece.

also - Triming, L. (2012) An Uncomfortable Armchair, Abstract Critical, 24 January. available from: http://abstractcritical.com/article/an-uncomfortable-armchair/ [accessed 17.11.12].