INTERFACE
Visual art exhibitions and events with a platform for critical writing
REVIEW
Hybrids: International Contemporary Painting
Tate Liverpool, Liverpool 6 April – 24 June
Reviewed by: Paul Peden
Much has been written of late about the apparent resurgence of abstraction. There is a case put that a new breed of painting is evolving that embraces a broad range of elements, languages and fields of aesthetic interest. But what does this new found eclecticism add up to? Is it a mere play-off of styles or a true relinquishing of an exclusive, formalist visual code – an attempt by painters to engage with the world and articulate it through an individual sensibility? Ambitious painting with sincere sentiment in 2001?
Tate Liverpool presents us with a collection of recent work that attempts to do just this. 'Hybrid' brings together eight artists from North America, Britain, Germany and Brazil.
Berlin-based Franz Ackermann makes large-scale, dynamic oil paintings. Based upon his experience of a visit to Liverpool, the artist produced a series of small, intimate studies on paper. These 'mental maps' inform the mural-sized canvases where a disorientating barrage of predominantly abstract information is occasionally infiltrated with representational clues. This fragmented style reflects well the city's scarred topography.
Inka Essenhigh paints eerie sci-fi settings occupied by mutated cyber beings. Although futuristic, they resonate a familiarity, evoking today's increasingly ungraspable technologies and scientifically-altered genetics, suggesting a fine line between our immediate experiences of the world and fictional expectations of the future.
Sarah Morris presents her trademark 'funked up', glossy take on architecture. The recent paintings however harness a new, more complicated and contorted take on the perspective device. The accompanying film, AM/PM serves as both a footnote to the sources that inspire her and a documentary tribute to the overwhelming nature and often overlooked beauty of cities.
David Reed is the daddy here, although he sits well in this context. His swathes of tinted resins reference the Baroque, whilst resonating echoes of digital imagery and cinematic experience.
Monique Prieto paints quirky, slick forms that transcend their computer-doodle origins. She manages to imbue simple colourful shapes with an anthropomorphic presence so that they sit on their raw canvas ground with a weight and authority that evokes perverse narrative relationships between the components.
In contrast Fiona Rae presents a broadened vocabulary incorporating Las Vegas-style lettering and glitter alongside her more familiar sources. The emptied-out composition however leaves the solitary stains and slowed gestures lacking an inferred dialogue, instead reading as isolated, indexed information.
Fabian Marcaccio generates large-scale canvases onto which a heterogeneous collage of disparate visual information has been printed – flora interweaves with brush strokes on top of which he vehemently applies swathes of silicone and paint. These 'paintants' mounted on an armature built from pipes and cords have an ominous presence, almost poised to snap and push beyond the boundaries of the canvas parameters. Although perhaps the strangest 'hybrid' on show, he has created a unique pictorial idiom and one which challenges our preconceptions of how painting presents itself.
The work of Beatriz Milhazes subsumes lessons taken from twentieth century painting (Matisse's decoration, Mondrian's structure) alongside the frenetic arabesques and explosive spirals associated with the culture of her native Brazil. Through a process of applying paint to plastic sheets which she then glues to the canvas and peels off, she generates a surface that, whilst remaining flat and translucent, suggests traces of a corroded history.
None of the work shown here falls foul of the pervasive sense that painting should distance itself through irony, nor does it literally quote of pathetically illustrate ideas. Instead each artist intelligently articulates their pictorial matter and gets something new from it. It's to Tate's credit that it brings us a slice of painting that's living and breathing and not a museum-style fragment of history. There is a common misconception that abstraction is an impenetrable pictorial idiom that can be neither popular nor relevant. However this work shows that it provides a vibrant and vital means of engaging with a broad range of experiences. For the connoisseur this is recommended viewing – for the sceptic a must.
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PAUL PEDEN
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