High risk painting

Curated by artist Shezad Dawood, 'High risk painting' re-examines current trends in contemporary painting. Two individual artists and two artists working in collaboration combine painting, performance and video to rigorously analyse what it means to paint. Each work is comprised of two components - static two-dimensional images, and their use in space through performance and intervention. These paintings are only complete when the artists' actions transform them in the gallery.

Emily Wardill uses her own body in performances to deconstruct her use of painting. In 'Paul's Favourite Word is Parenthesis', she literally removes the paintings from the gallery wall, in order to use them to animate a lecture.

Chris Aldgate & Lee Johnson, within their installation 'Twin City', seemingly celebrate the legacy of almost-forgotten gestural abstractionist Hans Hartung. The extract shown here, as a part of a touring installation, engages Hartung's development of abstraction to incorporate notions of tourism and authorship. It is accompanied by a serialised scripted conversation, produced with playwright Chris Thorpe, which develops fictional narratives of their working process.

Jörg Banerjee employs his half-Indian, half-Austrian identity to question the process of art making. Banerjee shows a video of a trip to India, which animates a related series of paintings that almost spill off the wall. Utilising images of Hindu Gods, alpine scenery and domestic objects, his works attempt to escape from the restrictions of the two-dimensional.

High risk painting
Kurator: Shezad Dawood

mit Jörg Banerjee, Chris Aldgate & Lee Johnson, Emily Wardill