What constitutes 'a painting'?

‘Painting is a Painting is a Painting’, an interesting group show takes place at Initial Access, Wolverhampton, featuring John M Armleder, Rashid Johnson & Dirk Skreber.

A selection by Nicolai Frahm and Samuel Leuenberger, it features three artists working who all playfully question what constitutes 'a painting'. They all come from different backgrounds, working visually, conceptually, even ideologically very differently, albeit each one challenging our expectations of what really a painting can, feel and look like.

The title adapts Gertrude Stein’s 1913 poem ‘Sacred Emily’ – “a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose”: in Stein's view, using the name of a thing immediately invokes emotions, expectations and ideas. A curatorial note elaborates: “The exhibition presents artists who adopt the language of painting, but present it on a larger scale, creating a grander impact that allows the viewer to collaborate in the narrative of the final work. They engage in a great variety of artistic practices from sculpture to photography to graffiti, incorporating domestic items, images and iconic symbols from mass media into their work, but they always return to the seductive nature of painting.

The resulting amalgam, sometimes even Gesamtkunstwerk, invites questions of the very nature of painting itself, long before we consider questions of social, artistic, personal and political interpretation. For instance, works by Dirk Skreber such as Untitled, 2000 (exploding house) present the dystopian vision typical of his work, distorting elements of form, perspective and nature.

The artist’s work has a sculptural quality, his canvases bound with thick duct tape that elevates the painted surface. On the other hand, Rashid Johnson’s floor and wall works have a luscious physicality, Souls of Black Folk, 2010 consist of tiled shelves filled with objects redolent with Afro-American symbolism, books, shea butter, LP covers, moon rock.

Initial Access, a gallery launched to present works from Frank Cohen’s collection of contemporary art just on the outskirts of the millennium city of Wolverhampton. The venue presents different aspects of the Collection in a series of curated exhibitions. As readers may well remember, the gallery had hosted two ambitious ‘Passage to India’ shows in 20080-9 to celebrate the richness and diversity of contemporary Indian art.

(Image courtesy: Initial Access)