Cedric Bardawil is excited to present, Arcadian Minds, an exhibition featuring new works by Anthony Banks and Alex Gibbs. In dynamic, time-worn, and textured representations of space and place––from an altbau kitchen in Berlin to the post-industrial landscapes of the West Country––both artists engage with the history of the British landscape tradition in our own time. Having both been prodigal talents as painting students at the Royal College of Art, Banks and Gibbs developed a fruitfully rivalrous friendship as their own distinct sensibilities towards the materiality and meaning of mark-making in paint took their work in different directions. For the first time, their works are shown together and in conversation. While both artists are concerned with the revelatory in the everyday, and the compositional possibilities of a kind of “provincial” vernacular of painting, their work offers distinct directions for the future of site-responsive painting. The exhibition title, Arcadian Minds, refers to the imagined constitution of a kind of rural idyll: these are paintings of paradise and loss, the countryside and a perpetually furtive home, all the while grappling with the role of a cherished and contested medium––painting––in the contemporary moment.
