Posted by Rosie Jennings on July 18th, 2024.
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Exhibition catalogue Standing Ground
Kate Nichols, co-edited by exhibition curators Trevor Burgess and Raksha Patel
Publication launch: Friday 6 September 2024
What does it mean to paint the landscape of Britain today?
The landscapes presented in Standing Ground dramatically expand the British landscape painting tradition, in terms of subject matter, use of paint, and medium. Neither ‘the British landscape’, nor ‘today’s political landscape’ are fixed entities, but common threads that emerge (and at times unravel) in the paintings brought together in Standing Ground.
During and in the aftermath of the Covid pandemic, social disparities – including between those with access to green space and those without – became ever more exaggerated. The context of the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 reinvigorated discussion of the ongoing impact of slavery and empire on British culture.
Flooding, heatwaves, polluted rivers have all drawn further attention to the environmental desecration and climate catastrophe facing the planet (but disproportionately impacting the global south). Questions of landscape and belonging figure crucially in all of these developments. How might artists ‘Stand Ground’ in these contexts?
Landscape painting is a particularly freighted artistic genre, deeply connected to ideas of national identity. This is especially the case in Britain, where landscape painting is often regarded as the most significant historical national artistic achievement, and the landscapes of Gainsborough, Constable and Turner are sometimes seen as synonymous with British art altogether. Landscape painting is thus fundamental to narratives of British cultural identity, with the latter also fluid like paint itself. Its slippery and not always controllable quality takes on its own forms on the canvas – echoing humans’ failed attempts to subdue the natural world.
(Text: Dr Kate Nichols).
Standing Ground has been co-curated by Trevor Burgess and Raksha Patel (BAN Research Group lead: British South Asian Visual Art Post-Cool Britannia), with contributions and catalogue text from Kate Nichols (BAN Research Group lead: Race, Empire and the Pre-Raphaelites).
The painters in Standing Ground span several decades bringing an intergenerational dialogue about landscape painting today. They are Madi Acharya-Baskerville, Said Adrus, Trevor Burgess, Sir Frank Bowling, Jai Chuhan, Jasmir Creed (BAN Research Group lead: Chai Shai: Asian British Art), Kimathi Donkor, Bruno Grad, Grant Foster, Bhajan Hunjan, Azraa Motala, Raksha Patel and Shanti Thomas.
The exhibition catalogue has been supported through BAN legacy funding for affiliated Research Groups. It will be launched at the exhibition opening on Friday 6 September 2024.
To order a copy of the catalogue or for further information about the exhibition, please contact curators [email protected] and [email protected]
Standing Ground is open 7-22 September 2024 at Thames-Side Studios Gallery.
