The Indiscipline of Painting Opens at Tate St Ives

Last week, The Indiscipline of Painting opened at Tate St Ives. The Indiscipline of Painting is an international group exhibition including works by forty-nine artists from the 1960s to now and is on display until 3 Jan 2012, before the exhibition comes to our Mead Gallery from 14 Jan 2012. Selected by British painter Daniel Sturgis, and curated with Martin Clark (Artistic Director, Tate St Ives) and Sarah Shalgosky (Curator, University of Warwick) the exhibition considers how the languages of abstraction have remained urgent, relevant and critical as they have been revisited and reinvented by subsequent generations of artists over the last 50 years.

The contemporary position of abstract painting is problematic. It can be seen to be synonymous with a modernist moment that has long since passed, and an ideology which led the medium to stagnate in self-reflexivity and ideas of historical progression. The Indiscipline of Painting challenges such assumptions. It reveals how painting’s modernist histories, languages and positions have continued to provoke ongoing dialogues with contemporary practitioners, even as painting’s decline and death has been routinely and erroneously declared.

The show brings together works by British, American and European artists made over the last five decades and features major new commissions and loans. It includes important works by Andy Warhol, Frank Stella, Gerhard Richter and Bridget Riley alongside other lesser known artists such as Tomma Abts, Martin Barré, Mary Heilmann and Jeremy Moon.

The Indiscipline of Painting is a collaborative project between Tate St Ives and Mead Gallery, Warwick Arts Centre. We look forward to welcoming the exhibition in early 2012.