Adam Fenton’s Painting Club
Ben Clarke, David Dellagi, Mark Edmonds, Adam Fenton, Callum Green, Fiona Long, Paula MacArthur, Benjamin Prosser, Matthew Randle, Mark Sheeky, Hideatsu Shiba, Dovilė Šimonytė, Eleanor Watson
Adam Fenton’s Painting Club brings together a diverse range of 13 contemporary painters, artists who perhaps wouldn’t normally meet or exhibit together. The artists presented share an interest in a figurative painterly language and the exhibition aims to emphasize the breadth of different approaches it encompasses. The exhibition has been curated to create a dialogue between works and to form the basis for a discussion.
MOMA curator Laura Hoptman recently claimed that contemporary painting is in a state of atemporality, reflecting our current cultural moment. At a time where “all eras seem to exist at once”, any historical genre, stylistic language or motif can be adopted by the contemporary painter.
Adam Fenton’s Painting Club posits the idea that ‘contemporary painting’ as it is often presented is indeed nothing but a genre in itself, recognizable by very distinct formal elements. And often it is determined in so many ways by the intermediary segment of the art world – curators, collectors, gallerists – rather than by the artists themselves.
Thus, the exhibition wishes to address the notion of painting in terms of ‘personality’, as opposed to ‘contemporary’. Each artist in the exhibition demonstrates a personal passion for a unique subject matter, process or style that goes far deeper than just illustrating the current critical discourse. Hopefully, the exhibition will thereby contribute to pointing to the very rich breadth of painting today and a discussion of the diverse and interlapping elements of it.
