Studio 1
We, the Contemporary

What is contemporary about painting? That's a question this 2D studio tackles from multiple directions.

In this art studio, we expect to unearth answers that challenge our perceptions, formed not only through painterly history but also via those current social, economic and political circumstances, which point right at the changing nature of representation and communication. This art studio will look at the presence of digital and virtual technologies in relationship to painting's production, explore the ethics and the legitimacy of painterly gesture and mark-making. This studio's concerns with the contemporary will further venture into the formal and material elements of painting, exploring its objecthood and frontality, the embodiment of content or, indeed, its lack. Our intention is to return to the well-trodden legacies of art (what is modernism, after all? Can we really do without it?) and so to re-align art's legitimacies with the experiences of the now. This will entail asking good, solid questions about the presence of body, expression and subjectivity within painterly practice. Yes, that's human, that’s about us. Which is how we'll reinstate the currency of what it is we mean by contemporary.