I Cheer A Dead Man's Sweetheart: Painting in Britain Now – From Auerbach To Wragg

Rather than being a survey of recent British painting this exhibition’s purpose is to interrogate recent artistic practice by exploring the secondary preoccupations of painters.

The exhibition will group diverse practices into arrangements or juxtapositions of works that encourage its visitors to make their own connections and interpretations of and between the paintings included. The title is taken from Is My Team Ploughing, the poem by A. E. Housman. It is a conversation between a dead man and his still living friend within which it is revealed the friend is now with the girl he left behind when he died. The title is an allegory for the unsentimentally eclectic nature of contemporary painting practice.