Booth: E6, HALL 2
Taking Jan Verwoert's essay Why are conceptual artists painting again? Because they think it's a good idea (2005) as a theme for reflection, the booth presents paintings, or better yet, celebrates 'painting'. The essay discusses the current status of painting: does it qualify as 'contemporary art' or should it be rejected as 'irrelevant'? Painting was pronounced a 'royal road' of artistic practice in High Modernism theory. This doctrine was later refuted by conceptual art at the end of the 1960s when every medium represented only one possibility among many, and the only thing that eventually mattered was the idea.
Verwoert asks how painting, understood in terms of immanent conceptual practice, refers to the market and art institutions. He proposes a cynical position: 'as long as there are enough canvasses to sell, and as long as the buyer perceives the conceptualisation of a painting as just another refinement added to the commodity (one that does not trouble their bucolic conception of art), the market cares not a bit about the way painting has been subtly complicated by way of conceptual self-criticism.' On the other hand, the author argues that conceptual and ephemeral forms of practice, where interdisciplinary and project-based approaches boom at international biennales (and in the absence of material resistance) become trapped in institutional dependency.
In this context, we are pleased to present works - predominantly or assimilated within the practice of painting, since acrylic or oil is used or imitated - by Abdelkader Benchamma, Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh, Nargess Hashemi, Mohammed Kazem, Hesam Rahmanian, Haleh Redjaian and Hassan Sharif, who investigate the significance of 'painting' and adopt a multitude of positions by engaging with a practice specific to that medium, and/or to be understood with reference to the conceptual themes it proposes.
'It is not enough, in order for there to be painting, that the painter take up his brushes again' Damish tells us: it is still necessary that it be worth the effort, 'it is still necessary that [the painter] succeed in demonstrating to us that painting is something that we positively cannot do without, that is it indispensable to us, and that it would be madness - worse still, a historical error - to let it lie fallow today.'
Read Jan Verwoert's essay
