Exhibiting artists: Madi Acharya-Baskerville, Said Adrus, Trevor Burgess, Frank Bowling, Jai Chuhan, Jasmir Creed, Kimathi Donkor, Bruno Grad, Grant Foster, Bhajan Hunjan, Azraa Motala, Raksha Patel.
Curated by Raksha Patel and Trevor Burgess.
The landscapes presented in Standing Ground dramatically expand the British landscape painting tradition, in terms of subject matter, use of paint, and medium. Neither ‘the British landscape’, nor ‘today’s political landscape’ are fixed entities, but common threads that emerge (and at times unravel) in the paintings brought together in Standing Ground.
During and in the aftermath of the Covid pandemic, social disparities – including between those with access to green space and those without – became ever more exaggerated. The context of the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 reinvigorated discussion of the ongoing impact of slavery and empire on British culture.
Flooding, heatwaves, polluted rivers have all drawn further attention to the environmental desecration and climate catastrophe facing the planet (but disproportionately impacting the global south). Questions of landscape and belonging figure crucially in all of these developments. How might artists ‘Stand Ground’ in these contexts?
Landscape painting is a particularly freighted artistic genre, deeply connected to ideas of national identity. This is especially the case in Britain, where landscape painting is often regarded as the most significant historical national artistic achievement, and the landscapes of Gainsborough, Constable and Turner are sometimes seen as synonymous with British art altogether. Landscape painting is thus fundamental to narratives of British cultural identity, with the latter also fluid like paint itself. Its slippery and not always controllable quality takes on its own forms on the canvas – echoing humans’ failed attempts to subdue the natural world.
Text abridged from the catalogue essay to the exhibition by Dr Kate Nichols, Associate Professor of Art History, University of Birmingham. The catalogue, funded by the British Art Network, will be launched at the exhibition opening.
To order a copy of the catalogue or for further information about the exhibition, please contact curators [email protected] and [email protected]
The painters in Standing Ground span several decades bringing an intergenerational dialogue about landscape painting today.
About the curators:
Raksha Patel (b.1972, Leicester) studied MFA Painting at The Slade School of Art (1998). She works as an artist, writer, socially engaged practitioner and lecturer. Recent exhibitions: A Radical Decade, Rochdale Art Gallery in the 1980s, Touchstones Rochdale (2023), Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize (2023), Goddesses of Kings Cross, CSM Museum & Study Collection Gallery (2022). She is a Senior Lecturer on BA Painting, Camberwell College of Arts.
Trevor Burgess is an artist and curator based in Deptford. He studied BA Literature at University of East Anglia and MA Fine Art at Winchester School of Art. He makes paintings of urban life and social use of public space: how people interact with each other and their neighbourhood, locally in London and also in cities around the world in Europe, Latin America, India and Morocco. Burgess has exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions in the UK and internationally. Trevor was recently shortlisted for the International BBA Artist Prize 2024 in Berlin.
