Flat Volume

A large group exhibition of work from 38 artists including Larry Achiampong, Phyllida Barlow, Damien Meade, Celia Hempton and Mădălina Zaharia. Aimed at contextualising ‘Flat Volume’ and its’ concept within contemporary painting. Stemmed from Paul Nash’s ‘Equivalents for the Megaliths’ 1935 and Phyllida Barlow’s wealth of drawings and paintings.

In a time where we can be increasingly consumed by screens, the remit of the show is to highlight and absorb the physical forms and objects we are surrounded by and therefore also highlighting our own relationships to our physical haptic environments; how we deal with the importance of ‘object-ness’ and questioning the values of form through painting.

This selection of national and international artists all interrelate by their enduring preoccupation with how volume is conjured, achieved and explored through varieties of strategies, instincts and processes. These include spatial strategies to execute compositional disquiet; absolute (idiosyncratic) specificity of placement; a pull to unusual structures; desire for ‘solid’ forms (within the picture plane).

These works bring to the forefront object/non-objects and in doing so enhance our attention upon the visual fundamentals but through slow(ed) viewing (within the dynamic ‘lived’ and arresting moments of the painting) which allows us to view and interrogate material culture and value systems; our relationship to them and ideally more consciously acknowledge them, however beguiling.

Curated by Sarah Longworth-West

Essay by Nicholas Hatfull