Tuesday, October 08, 2013

Laura Lancaster: "Painting Past Present" Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle, UK

Image: Laura Lancaster   Untitled, 2013, Acrylic on canvas, 20 x 34 cms, Courtesy of the artist and Workplace Gallery

 

 

Painting Past Present

until 9th February 2014

 

Laing Art Gallery
New Bridge Street
Newcastle upon Tyne
NE1 8AG

 

Helen Baker, Paul Housley, Laura Lancaster, Eleanor Moreton, Mali Morris, Narbi Price, James Ryan, Helen Smith, Alli Sharma, Sue Spark, Emma Talbot

 

This exhibition combines paintings from past generations of artists that are part of the Laing Art Gallery permanent collection with works from a new generation of painters. Works have been selected that have inspired or informed contemporary working methods This exhibition explores the way painters pass on their craft to further generations. It explores the way a new generation can rework the past in a way that is not ironical nor a pastiche. By looking at  materials and methods of painting attached to different windows in time we can understand the dialogue that is continued artist to artist in a medium as old as history itself. By comparing new paintings with older works, contemporary attitudes and ideas are clarified. We are given a sense of the continuing fascination that craft holds in painting and the way that it offers new ways of understanding and recycling part redundant ideologies. The exhibition will not only give a historical and contemporary take on traditional methods and media such as tempera, oil and collage but also consider meaning within a historical context by looking at the way craft informs and works with the current concerns of the moment.