24 Aug 2023. In other words, the date on which a new exhibition project will open at the Telegraph Gallery, for this time charting ongoing trends in contemporary British painting. Curated by Jane Neal, the exhibition will introduce the Olomouc art scene to five artists who are each individually contributing their unique signature to shaping the contemporary shape of the British art world.
The exhibition New Positions in British Painting is part of a conceptual series of projects at Telegraph Gallery, which map the contemporary art scene in Europe. In 2021, the space was occupied by an exhibition of works entitled German Painting Now, charting artists who fall within the circle of the so-called Neuer Leipzig Schule. Last year, then, Danish painting was in the spotlight, by a pair of artists, Farshad Farzankii and Frederik Næblerød. In terms of future plans, we can reveal that we are planning an exhibition of Romanian painters next year - one of the leading figures in Romanian painting, Radu Baies, was featured in the Telegraph Gallery for his monographic exhibition Searching For My Human Traces in 2021.
Jane Neal for the second time at the Telegraph Gallery
Jean Neal is a British curator and art historian who specialises in Central and Eastern European painting. She is particularly interested in artists working with figurative imagery in their work. This is the second time Jane Neal has collaborated with the Telegraph Gallery in the New Positions in British Painting exhibition - the first project she completed in Olomouc was the aforementioned German Painting Now exhibition of artists working in Leipzig and Berlin.
For Jane Neal it is typical to work closely with artists and to reveal hidden - often subconsciously embedded - meanings in painting. According to Jane Neal, while the artists of the new Leipzig school, through their figurative tendencies and the specific visuality of their works, were reacting to the socialist realism, prevalent in the Eastern Bloc at the time, suddenly mixed with abstract Western tendencies after the fall of the Wall, the opposite is true within the British school. As Jane Neal writes in her text - in the 1980s figurative painting was declared almost dead on London soil. The medium of painting itself was no better off - but around 2000 a turning point came and the slow development of these approaches morphed into the phenomenon of today.
Jane Neal will present five artists at the Telegraph Gallery who - in her own words - have been key figures in shaping the image of contemporary British painting through their individual approaches. Berlin-based Tom Anholt will present his paintings influenced by the German Expressionist milieu. Painter Jessie Makinson will incorporate themes of women as archetypal leaders, her feminist approaches will be complemented and gently confronted by Caroline Walker's paintings depicting women in enclosed and intimate settings. At the same time, the words indigeneity and archetype could be used to introduce the work of David Brian Smith - a painter depicting rural motifs psychedelically underlined by imaginative colour. The exhibition will be completed by Justin Mortimer's work, which moves in two typical spheres - traditional portraiture and imaginative narrative paintings.
The exhibition New Positions in British Painting will open on 24 Aug 2023 at 6pm. The exhibition itself will then run until 23 November 2023.
By Barbora Křížová / Telegraph Gallery
