Well known and emerging artists from Europe, North and South America react to the paradox of trying to call to mind interior and inner spaces of the mind as well as the physical spaces we inhabit.
Archipeinture included paintings and installations by seventeen artists, many showing in the UK for the first time, with new, specially commissioned installations throughout the building. The selection began with paintings made during the mid 1980s by Belgian artist René Daniëls. The space in his paintings is organised in direct relationship to the viewer’s experience of seeing art hung on the walls of a gallery.
Architecture and the body, memory and even the cosmos are all themes that underlie many of the artists’ work. The exhibition included an ‘exploding’ schematic painting by Julie Mehretu and a psychedelic ‘mental map’ painting by Franz Ackermann. Santiago Cucullu makes a new wall painting and Ulf Puder presents a melancholic landscape of cube architecture. Yves Bélorgey’s boldly observed paintings of modernist London housing schemes at Alexandra Road near Camden Arts Centre are shown for the first time in the UK. In works by Andro Wekua, Toby Ziegler and Oliver Zwink, paintings become sculptural, setting up relationships with the space where they are installed and questioning the source of their origin.
Silke Schatz created a wall work in the stairwell of Camden Art Centre with a drawing recalling the places where she has lived and loved. The dominant theme of Hurvin Anderson’s seductive paintings have at their heart the memory of spaces, how they are used or defined psychologically and collectively in terms of political history and ethnicity. Other artists take on the manipulation of space in different ways, from the formal impasto and collaged feel of staged views by Matthias Weischer to the archetypal studio ‘mise-en-abyme’ evocation of spatial experiences in Thomas Huber’s large scale painting.
Films and video works on parallel themes by artists including Alain Bublex, Mircea Cantor, Lucile Desamory, Richard Fauget, Anne Frémy, Frédéric Guelaff, Pia Rönicke and Tintin Wulia were showing throughout the summer in the Reading Room.
Paris based writer Elizabeth Lebovici had contributed to the File Note accompanying the exhibition and a specially designed pack of cards produced by Le Plateau/Frac Ile-de-France with text by Bruce Haines was available from the Bookshop.
