Everything That Happens Will Happen Today

25 May-20 Jul 2024

PV 24 May 2024, 6-8pm

Overview

Bringing together four distinct painters – Bernadette Kerrigan, Chris Martin, Daniel Pettitt, and EJ Hauser – Everything That Happens Will Happen Today explores the formal and informal ways each of them make sense of the world through paint. 

KARST acts as a meeting point for a multiplicity of concerns the artists explore through a range of visual registers. Spanning generations, genders and continents, the artists – and their works – are connected through affinities: conversations emerge across the gallery space allowing for overlapping conceptual and material attitudes to chime. Bernadette Kerrigan’s visual vocabulary indicates the multifaceted and mutable significance of things. Chris Martin’s colourful works merge encyclopaedic figuration with painterly abstraction. Daniel Pettitt’s paintings track fluctuations of index, memory, fragment, metaphor and mood as they congeal and dissolve into partial images. EJ Hauser combines impressions of natural phenomena with lyrical phrases, and graphic and typographic strategies. 

The exhibition’s title Everything That Happens Will Happen Today is taken from David Byrne and Brian Eno’s eponymous collaborative album and song. It serves as a thematic anchor, highlighting the interconnectedness of creative endeavours and underscoring the importance of unity and camaraderie. It can also be understood as a poetic declaration on all the possibilities available when making a painting – intuition, design, chance, and technique are all factors that come into play. 

Rather than attempting to define a movement in contemporary painting, Everything That Happens Will Happen Today brings into focus the social relationships and networks through which painters can share ideas – as well as spheres of influence and access to platforms, such as this exhibition. Through vibrant paintings and works on paper, viewers are invited to explore unconventional narratives and interpretive possibilities that challenge notions of artistic expression. 

Everything That Happens Will Happen Today is supported by Arts Council England,  Timothy Taylor and Haverkampf Leistenschneider, Berlin.

The exhibition opens on Friday 24 May from 6-8pm. Join us on Saturday 25 May for an informal walk-through with Bernadette Kerrigan and Daniel Pettitt at 11.30am. The exhibition will be on view until Saturday 20 July (Wed-Sat, 11am-5pm). 

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