Is the pandemic prompting a resurgence in painting?
Post-lockdown London is witnessing a surge in exhibitions of paintings. What, if anything, makes the medium still relevant?
Tasha Amini, Sleep Relay, 2019, Oil on canvas, Courtesy the artist (photographed at Mixing It Up: Painting Today, Hayward Gallery)
Painting ended when Duchamp signed that upside-down urinal in 1917 – at least as far as art historians are concerned. Or maybe two years earlier, when Malevich painted his Black Square.
The arrival of photography in the nineteenth century had already done away with representational painting. Since then, an artist had to have an exceptionally solid and preferably unusual reason to resort to picking up a brush.
In my book on twentieth-century Soviet art, I argued that the dominance of painting in the nuclear and space age was a sign of a backwards and totalitarian system. So, what is the resurgence of painting in the private-run space age a sign of?
Just as the pandemic brought both a surge in Zoom-meetings and a return to 1950s family roles, it also seems to have effected a juxtaposition of digital and real in art.
Auction houses are in a race to break records in NFT (non-fungible token) sales. Photography and video art seem Last Century. Installations are for museums. And suddenly painting has emerged as an unexpected and undisputed favourite in both public and private galleries. But is it an up-to-date and relevant medium?
Lisa Brice, Charley, 2020, Ink, synthetic tempera, pencil crayon on linen mounted on wooden panel, Courtesy the artist; Stephen Friedman Gallery, London; Salon 94, New York; and Goodman Gallery, South Africa (photographed at Mixing It Up: Painting Today, Hayward Gallery)
Having trained as an art historian and honing my skills through exhibitions and fairs over the last couple of decades – both as curator and visitor – I’ve come to hold a rather prejudiced (snobbish, let’s admit it) view of painting.
For sure paintings are to be expected at the National Gallery and Tate Britain thanks to the period covered by their permanent collections. Paintings in the Summer Exhibition don’t raise any eyebrows either. But a dedicated show at the Hayward and not-one-but-two shows at the Royal Academy? That is certainly a shift in outlook by the art establishment.
Mohammed Sami, Family Issues II, 2020, Mixed media on canvas, Courtesy of the artist and Modern Art, London (photographed at Mixing It Up: Painting Today, Hayward Gallery)
As the title of the Hayward show – Mixing It Up: Painting Today – suggests, painting is seen as a medium where things can get mixed up. However, if you think this implies unusual use of various paints and colours – that’s not quite it. The first several rooms of the show have paintings that are resoundingly representative and highly naturalistic. In fact, in the entire show there are only a couple of art works that could be called abstract. The rest rely heavily on our ability to read imagery, even if to question that ability. There is a semi-open door here (Lisa Brice, Untitled (After Vallotton), 2021), a door propped by a chair there (Mohammed Sami, Family Issues II, 2020), a curtain (Louise Giovanello, Prarie, 2021) or a clock (Issy Wood, Important Timepiece, 2018) or a boat (Matthew Krishanu, Two Boys on a Boat, 2019), not to mention all the human characters.
Painting, unlike photography, cannot pretend to be a window to reality, however constructed. It is inherently something of the imagination. It also demands an appreciation of the skill: How has she done it? Who is she – or he? In this exhibition, as in the Summer Exhibition at the RA, the question is paramount. The info on the wall at Hayward will tell you that these are works by artists who live and work in the UK. But it is the press release that clarifies the matter: over a third of the artists are born outside the UK, and a record number – a majority – are female.
At the RA Summer Exhibition, Yinka Shonibare made it his mission to include as diverse a range of artists as possible, including untrained artists and people of a variety of ethnic and social backgrounds. The context matters, and context has been important in art for a long time. The artist’s background is part of the story. Having ever read anything about Joseph Beuys you would know to question any such stories, but the world seems to yearn for a return of the real. The real brushstrokes, the real drama. Maybe the world also needs something static, something solid – not one more of the constantly changing videos on your phone.
Louise Giovanelli, Prairie, 2021, Oil on canvas, Collection of Daniel Fabian (photographed at Mixing It Up: Painting Today, Hayward Gallery)
Paintings also fit with our rediscovered appreciation of the home – home décor sales are rising, and what better step up from the nation’s John Lewis obsession than a unique piece of art that can be put on the wall?
What is painting? The Hayward show tries to stick with a more traditional definition – most works consist of paint on a flat surface – but the temptation to widen the parameters was strong. For at least two of the artists, painting is only one part of their practice. Their works are multi-media installations. Samara Scott has produced mesmerising plastic and debris suspended in shampoo and other liquids – cleverly used as windows offering partial but dramatic views of the Thames’s landscape outside the gallery. Another sneaky installation is by Alvaro Barrington, who paints carpets and sets them into concrete boxes. Definitions of paint and surface are extended to include other media such as rice grains in Allison Katz’s works, or books in Louise Giovanelli’s.
Samara Scott, Chrysanthemums, 2021, Plexiglass, shampoo, corn oil, broken glass, hair gel, food colouring, pigments, sandwich bags, mouth wash, found objects, Courtesy of The Sunday Painter Gallery (photographed at Mixing It Up: Painting Today, Hayward Gallery)
I planned to compare the Hayward’s ‘high’ painting with the Summer Exhibition’s more populist offerings. But this year’s RA curators had other ideas. There were numerous paintings, but the show steered to artists working in other media, even if predominantly two-dimensional. There were textile pieces, re-purposed household objects, photographs and prints along with occasional large-scale sculptures and a variety of smaller objects.
The Summer Exhibition is a large sale, so it is not surprising that multiples, such as prints, are in demand. They have affordable price tags and produce nice opportunities to display rows of those ubiquitous red dots. However, it is always the large-scale paintings that play centre stage in every room and draw the visitor back to the question of value in art. They are more expensive, they are one-of-a-kind, they are seen as a direct link to the artist’s hand and therefore her or his mysterious artistic vision. Here artists were unashamedly playful – lots of colours, lots of abstract works. These are works that are supposed to attract the viewer’s eye, to stand out in the multitude of rows that is the Summer Exhibition’s famous hang.
At the Hayward, each artist had their own area on the wall, with at least two paintings displayed. The works shown are the ones that make a statement, tell a story, question a situation. They play by the rules of contemporary art in engaging with society, politics and so on. But they are doing it with a medium that creates both a link and a barrier between the artist and the viewer. On the one side, both the artist’s background and physical presence are preserved in this immediate method of art making. On the other – viewer participation is limited, even the viewpoint is usually only from the front. The entire message is consolidated on one surface; a multi-dimensional world reduced to a flat imitation. The story (if there is one) is predefined by the artist, with enough left for interpretation, but little for imagination.
Summer Exhibition 2021, Royal Academy of Arts
Over the summer the RA staged two shows dedicated to individual artists. One was David Hockney’sextensive series of landscapes. The other, Michael Armitage’s paintings together with works of other artists – mostly East African painters – who have influenced him. Hockney and Armitage are working on completely different wavelengths, but they share a common passion of finding new paths for painting.
Hockney’s enthralling series of landscapes was created using a custom app on an iPad. Each one separately is an ordinary nature scene, with special attention given to trees, but as an installation they become an enveloping experience. Over a hundred of them are displayed side by side, numbered and dated. The story they told was that of eternal seasonal change, one of life’s miracles. It was also a reminder of the pandemic and lockdown. If you were one of the many who discovered their local park thanks to the one-walk-per-day policy, you would remember the sense that nature brought back to a senseless situation. You would also remember Zoom. Are iPad paintings to ‘real’ paintings as a Zoom call is to a live meeting? They achieve two things at once – reiterate and question the status of painting as a medium. The skill, the attention, the uniqueness. Aren’t they all present here? But isn’t any painting, whether on canvas or on a tablet, still only a substitute for something else even more real?
Armitage’s works are created using another unusual material – Lubugo bark cloth which has cultural associations in East Africa. Pieces of it, including visible seams and holes, create large-scale surfaces for his complicated narrative paintings. These are works on a grand scale depicting important events, mixed with Western painting motifs. They are drawing out dominant political narratives and questioning the dream of paradise so prevalent among the world’s politicians in the late 2010s. Armitage is uniting European and African painterly traditions and is choosing a subject that is a local metaphor for the worldwide issue. By doing so he gives the medium of painting a new sense of urgency and meaning that it lacks otherwise.
Michael Armitage, The Chicken Thief, 2019, Oil on Lubugo bark cloth, Courtesy the artist and White Cube (photographed at Michael Armitage: Paradise Edict, Royal Academy)
But paintings can be decorative and collectible too. The Summer Exhibition is unusual in being a selling exhibition. State galleries usually don’t deal in artwork and therefore need support for shows. It may be no surprise that banks and other commercial institutions would offer support. For Michael Armitage’s show this was BNP Paribas, but also White Cube – a major art gallery. The list is longer for Mixing it Up: there are major gallerists such as David Zwirner, Stephen Friedman, and Thomas Dane, together with various collectors. The said galleries represent the artists in the show and collectors have their works in their collections. It is commendable to assist an art institution which otherwise would not be able to put on a show, however it is also an economic decision, because it raises the value of the art that you have in your collection, or a gallery has for sale.
Over the course of the pandemic, two acquaintances of mine have opened private contemporary art galleries – Three Highgate and Claas Reiss – and both are specialising in paintings. Which surprised me.
Visiting them I was reminded of one quality of painting that differentiates it from other media. It can be grand, but also intimate; in your face, but also detailed. Seeing a painting in a photo, on a screen, in a paper or on a blog never does it justice. The size is almost always a surprise; paintings are infallibly either larger or smaller than you imagined them. Then there is the colour, the detail, that ephemeral feeling – all inevitably changing the story you thought you already knew.
The scale is grander in large galleries, but smaller ones offer the possibility to go closer, to smell the paint, so to say. If your local gallery is still open, give it a try, see what you think. I may not be a complete convert, but even I can admit that paintings require the viewer to slow down, such a rare concept in a world that insists on speeding up.
Cover image: Matthew Krishanu, Two Boys on a Boat, 2019, Oil on board, Kirklees Collection: Huddersfield Art Gallery, Presented by the Contemporary Art Society (photographed at Mixing It Up: Painting Today, Hayward Gallery).
Mixing It Up: Painting Today, Hayward Gallery, 9 September – 12 December 2021
Summer Exhibition 2021, Royal Academy, 22 September 2021 – 2 January 2022
David Hockney, The Arrival of Spring, Normandy, 2020, Royal Academy, 23 May – 1 August 2021
Michael Armitage, Paradise Edict, Royal Academy, 22 May – 19 September 2021