Real Painting

Real Painting

12 June 2015 — 2 August 2015

Artists: Simon Callery, Adriano Costa, Deb Covell, Angela de la Cruz, Lydia Gifford, David Goerk, Alexis Harding, Jo McGonigal, DJ Simpson, Finbar Ward.

Castlefield Gallery is pleased to present Real Painting, an exhibition of new and existing work by ten artists working nationally and internationally including 2010 Turner Prize nominee Angela de la Cruz and 2004 John Moores Painting Prize winner’s Alexis Harding. Curated by Deb Covell and Jo McGonigal the exhibition emphasizes the essential grammar of painting, considering not necessarily what a painting means but what it ‘does’.

Each artist shares a purposeful interest in the material components of painting and its ability to assume its own presence, rather than being symbolic of something else. Slipping between painting and object, the visual and physical, the work in the exhibition highlights the expressive capacity of the materials and processes speci?c to painting to be sites of investigation in their own right.

Throughout the exhibition painting is transformed from subject matter to object matter, transcending its flat surface to fix the viewer’s attention on ‘seeing’ as both a visual and physical encounter.

‘I make physical paintings – because I am interested in the viewer as a physical being – a fully sentient, inquisitive, perceptive, decision-making, information-processing, emotional, idiosyncratic thinking being. I want the painting to involve and engage the full attention of that person’ (Simon Callery (Interview in Abstract Critical 22/8/12) Questions for Angela de la Cruz and Simon Callery: Enantiodromia Part I. FOLD Gallery, London)

A commissioned essay (downloadable below) and a talk by Craig Staff (Reader in Fine Art at The University of Northampton and author of After Modernist Painting: The History of a Contemporary Practice published by I.B.Tauris, 2013) accompanies the exhibition.