CITIZEN

tactileBOSCH Gallery & Studios

 9th – 30th April 2011

         The history of two-dimensional artwork, possibly more than that of other mediums, has become defined by a series of epochs, with each of these epochs and their respective seminal artists becoming almost universally recognisable. Yet it is not just these artworks and their repeated reproductions that become ever-present but also the rubric of how to interpret them, which is often that which was advanced by those who initially championed the artists. It becomes hard to view Pop Art detached from the musings of Warhol or Abstract Expressionism detached from the dogma of Greenberg. While the theories were crucial to the ascension of these works into the canon of Western Art their ubiquity and the rigidity of their attachment to the artwork can lead the artwork to becoming emptied-out of all but these preconfigured ways of looking at and appreciating them. Thus the way seminal works are experienced and understood has become almost static and immune to the passage of time and the changes of context. It is because of this that there will forever remain a need for new work by artists that is free from a fixed interpretation and that we can never pronounce the death of Painting, Printmaking and Drawing.
         CITIZEN is an exhibition of new work by twelve artists who define themselves as working within the fields of Painting, Printmaking or Drawing and is testament to the continued strength, vitality, relevance and diversification within the three mediums.
         Today artists no longer feel the need to be part of ideological or stylistic movements nor strive to attain radical and uncharted formalistic terrain and to echo this artists have not been selected in accordance with pre-defined criteria or to demonstrate a cohesion amongst current ways of working but instead each work has been selected in isolation and picked because it achieves what it sets out to do within its own terms. Because of this CITIZEN spans a spectrum of appearances as broad as the subject of the exhibitions title, ranging from those who instinctively draw on the traditions of the past to those who work in dialogue with current trends.
         For the exhibition the curators have refrained from drawing any links between the works or imposing an overarching curatorial framework which is reflected in the lack of the didactic apparatus of an assertive exhibition statement. In addition to this the artists have been invited to become involved in the discussion on how to best situate their work within the compartmentalised gallery. They have also been given the opportunity to decide the amount of supporting text that will accompany their work, if any, so they are able to choose how they wish to mediate between their work and the audience.
         This approach aims to distance the exhibition from any claims of being a survey or cross section of current practices and avoids attempting to outline similarities devised by the curators or impose a sense of cohesion amongst such a disparate collection of work. Thus if there is a conversation that runs as a thread through this contrasting selection of works it is to be extrapolated solely by the audience.