Painting Now: Out of Elam
10 December, 2013 - 16 February, 2014
Long Gallery
Jamie Chapman, Standard Ratio (detail); Toby Raine: Ozzy Meditating with Floral Wallpaper (detail). (2013)
Painting Now: Out of Elam features new work by six recent MFA graduates of Elam School of Fine Arts. The participating artists are Diane Scott, Glen Snow, Ian Peter Weston, Jamie Chapman, Toby Raine, André Sampson.
What does Painting Now: Out of Elam claim of those it represents? Contemporaneity is certainly part of its claim. The six painters represented here remain unproven as emerging artists within a contemporary discourse, although they hope to shape that discourse with their work. The exhibition maintains that painting still has currency within a culturally and technologically advanced economy. The claim for those showing in Painting Now: Out of Elam is to join their voices with many who make painting necessary to their ideas, who find that painting remains vital, even after all its history, and full of possibilities within our present.
The six painters in Painting Now: Out of Elam are recent Master of Fine Arts graduates of Elam School of Fine Arts at the University of Auckland. ‘Out of Elam’ suggests exodus: it is like saying ‘out of Africa’ or more biblically, ‘out of Eden’ – out of the cradle of creation, no longer innocent. Now, being a painter is much harder work. Gone are the days of simply picking up a brush and satisfying one’s aesthetic impulse. To come to painting ‘out of Elam’ is for each of these individuals to have negotiated their independent inclinations and idiosyncrasies through the weight of painting’s histories, where painting is tested both conceptually and materially. A position is taken up within the larger socio-cultural context, where what constitutes ‘painting now’ has less definition than within the walls of the academy. And yet in spite of this there is a rigour, a disciplined indiscipline, to borrow from the phrasing of painter Daniel Sturgis[1]. Painting Now: Out of Elam attempts to show some solutions to encompassing the present while utilising a means that has been around since the days of yore.
[1] Daniel Sturgis, Sarah Shalgosky, and Martin Clark, The Indiscipline of Painting. London: Tate St Ives and Mead Gallery in association with Tate Publishing, 2011. 7-12.