Artists>
Giuseppe Armenia,Anna Best,Grzegorz Borkowski,Louis Couturier, Jimmie Durham, Jonas Ekeberg, Seamus Farrell Andreas Gedin, Douglas Gordon, Ogar Grafe, Hlynur Hallsson, Timo Heino, Ragna St. Ingadottir, Frans Jacobi, Piotr Komarnicki, Jeroen Kooijmans, Endre Koronczi, Michael Kurzwelly, Angela Melitopoulos, Emilio López-Menchero, Ketil Nergaard, Ole Jö rgen Ness, Caro Niederer, Miika Nyyssö, Honoré d’O, Eva Maria Ocherbauer,
Dan Oki, Lars Bendt Pedersen, Eva von Platen, Moo McRobin, Alfredo Romano, Peter Sandbichler, Corinna Schnitt, Ingvar Sjöberg, Klavdij Sluban, Sandra Sterle, Karl Johan Stigmark, Apolonija šušteršić, Agnes Szabicz, Vibeke Tandberg, Bea de Visser, Johan de Wit, Vlasta Žanić
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Non-Painters-Painting — Negation + Subject + Verb. It sounds like some kind of dialectic is at play here – a dialectic pointing towards a relation between… let us call it something interdisciplinary and something that has to do with artistic identity.
The participating artists who work with other mediums than painting will in this setting become non-painters.
– Should we go further into an explication of the title’s logic? Dealing too explicitly with references etc… can’t it end up feeling – in relation to art today – too much a thing of our recent past..?
You might run the risk of being left with a bad taste in your mouth.
– I guess for the moment being, one should be subtle and not talk too explicitly about these things in art.
But still… can’t you feel that there is something ‘reversed’ behind the concept of Non-Painters-Painting. There is… it struck me that I’ve seen this kind of exhibition quite often.
The only thing that differs this time, is that the artists are asked to paint something, instead of doing something in a new medium for art… Like an exhibition on the Internet where the artists are invited to present some material in a looped form for instance… something that has just become possible through the technological advancements of today.
– In this exhibition however, the artists are not invited to break new territory, but an old one – painting. The time span of artistic evolution is thrown around here. This can’t be an accident, rather a ‘catch’ behind the theme of the show.
– With this catch in mind, the whole exhibition – instead of a group show – starts to turn towards the direction of a show by Ketil Nergaard (the one who gave all these non-painters their painters starting kit).
Yes, I think this makes for a more interesting angle of what goes on at this exhibition.
– Taking this perspective, the participating artists have been led into something that reminds me of the children’s game of ‘hide and seek’… a game in which the artists play the roles of ‘artists’ with the split ambitions of making works on canvases without making paintings.
– Okay, where does this ‘hide and seek’ get us? You get the choice of seeing the paintings as paintings or non-paintings. And this would… make this show something other than one just breaking new ground by having the artist use a new medium… like the Internet.
– If we accept that a game is at play, would the effects of it add up to something concrete?
Well, in relation to the title of the show Non-Painters-Painting, the outcome of the game leads to a different ‘substantivation’ of the activity of non-painting. One that does more then just establish art in a new field or medium.
Staffan Boije af Gennäs
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The idea for this project came up during a discussion among the participating artists in an exhibition in Italy last summer. We reacted to the attitude of the curators and the way in which the artists were treated, and we discussed the idea to arrange an international exhibition without going through the art bureaucracy, but instead to use the networks between artists.
The result is “Non-Painters-Painting”, an exhibition with 45 artists from over 20 countries. In the middle of June it was first shown at “Ocean 1” in Malmö, Sweden, and from then it was exhibited in Galerie BERLINTOKIO. This autumn it will be shown in Oslo, Arnhem, Zagreb, Finland and maybe Poland.
The concept
The idea for the exhibition is to see how visual artists from other fields than painting approaches the medium. All participating artists received a “painters-start-kit”, including a stretched canvas 30×40 cm, acrylic paint and brushes, and were given a limited time to finish their work. The exhibition is shown together with a small library of the artists catalogues and other documentation, making it possible for the viewer to compare the paintings with official work of each artist.
The artists
The list of artists include around two artists from most of the European countries. Around a third of them participated in the exhibition in Italy, another third were invited by these again, and a third were artists living in Berlin
Ketil Nergaard
