VALUE VALUE VALUE
Curated by Peter Lamb
15th February - 21st March 2024
Birgir Birgisson Shane Bradford Jim Cheatle Peter Lamb Gustav Metzger
Tahmina Negmat Aidan O’Sullivan Playpaint Kate Steciw
Kate Steciw, The Waterbearer, 2023, Inkjet prints on canvas, collage on panel, 127 × 101.6 cm
‘Painting's capacity to appear particularly saturated with a lifetime of its own author makes it an ideal candidate for value production’.
Isabelle Graw
Jim Cheatle, Plastic 4, 2023, Giclee prints on Hahnemuhle Museum Etching, 74 × 59 cm
'Value Value Value’ brings together 9 artists whose work shows a willingness to collapse and renew recognisable authorship - artists who work so continuously on an artwork that often nothing recognisable of the artist’s hand remains - artists who lose themselves so completely in the activity that they become more synonymous with the chosen tool in the labour of making, than the final artwork itself.
In ‘Value Value Value’, Steciw, Bradford, and Lamb’s work repurposes itself, like regurgitating pistons. Birgisson’s paintings slowly evaporate whilst O’Sullivan and Negmat’s soiled works almost dissolve into the canvas. Metzger appears as a destroyer rather than a creator, and a similar disappearing act can be found in the work of Cheatle and Playpaint, where the human hand of labour fuses with the feedback loops of emerging technologies.
There is a contradiction in that it can become the way of working itself that is identifiable, and yet value can still be found in the work of artists who sidestep categorisation and employ an authentic perpetual reassessment of the painted mark and what that means.
Peter Lamb
Tahmina Negmat, Endless Infatuations with Malcolm Mcdowell, 2019, Oil on plaster, 80 × 90 × 8 cm
Curated by PETER LAMB
Peter Lamb’s work can be read as combinations of elements of paint, photography and print media with no preference on one process over another. These influences expand and contract at interval and play with the possibilities of each, absorbing respective tendencies, traits of one medium are correspondingly outputted within the practices of another. The work exists in a broader network of painting that reflects on a practice caught up in a transitive state of being. In other words, something that passes from, between and into another state. Peter has exhibited nationally and internationally over the last 25 years with recent exhibitions in Iceland, USA and The Netherlands.