Exhibition

Frivolous Convulsions

11 Jan 2018 – 25 Feb 2018

Event times

Wed-Sun 11-5pm

Cost of entry

FREE

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Turf Projects

Croydon
England, United Kingdom

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Travel Information

  • East Croydon Station
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How can we live, uninhibited, when constantly bombarded by the instructive and the inauthentic? Perhaps the highly personalised, playful nature of the activity of painting confronts its tyranny directly, with its antidote.

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12 JAN – 25 FEB // FREE EXHIBITION // OPEN TO ALL WED-SUN 11-5PM // AT AT TURF, 46/47 TRINITY COURT (GROUND FLOOR), WHITGIFT SHOPPING CENTRE, CROYDON CR01UQ

OPENING NIGHT // Thurs 11 Jan 5-9pm // With Performances From Robin Bale, Jack Catling And Vanessa Mitter.

Aliki Krikidi // Babette Semmer // Grant Foster // Ben Westley Clarke // Denzil Forrester // Lucy Stein // David Harrison // Steven Allan // Melissa Kime // Vanessa Mitter // Jack Catling // Robin Bale // Stuart Brisley

Curated by Vanessa Mitter and Ben Westley Clarke

“In a world that has really been turned on its head, truth is a moment of falsehood” – Guy Debord 
“There is nothing funny about Halloween. This sarcastic festival reflects, rather, an infernal demand for revenge by children on the adult world”
 – Jean Baudrillard   

The ubiquity of photography and advertising and our involuntary immersion in the mediated world assembled by it, demand a creative human response. How can we live, uninhibited, when constantly bombarded by the instructive and the inauthentic?  How can we know embodied, unselfconscious experience in the society of images and spectacle? Perhaps a solution lies in bearing witness to its cacophonic multiplicity of truths. Perhaps the highly personalised, playful nature of the activity of painting confronts its tyranny directly, with its antidote.

Painters transform their childhood impulses to shriek, taunt, sing and run wild into vociferous, effusive experimentation. Like ecstatic bambinos, clutching watermelon slices and plastic axes, faces are painted like skulls; they play, unbounded, as a matter of course. Wielding paint, they throw themselves, cackling, into the dance of art and life. The tradition of painting goes back and back.  They invoke their ancestors and invite the dead to dance with them, their frisky rebellion allowing modernity to be reimagined as anything other than drab. Beneath the dull concrete of the everyday lies the tropical beach of expression. Sweetness doesn’t just emerge out of nowhere. It has to be willed into existence.

All of the painters in this exhibition are ‘painters of modern life’. The life impulse coexists with the death impulse. The painters bear witness, with an inextinguishable verve and energy, like spirits walking amongst the living. They have one foot in the grave. It dangles precariously. ‘No, no, the work of art is not destined for the generations of children to come. It’s offered to the innumerable dead. Who approve. Or refuse it‘ 1

Frivolous Convulsions is an exhibition which collides carnivalesque and celebratory renditions of modern life. From effusive expressionism to calculated documentary; from the folksy to the ultramodern, the clash of idioms and practices proposes the impulse towards painting as an essential social phenomenon. Each painting simultaneously addresses a need to converse and interact, and a need for individualism and boldness. In dialogue with the dead painters of history, the artists continue relentlessly in their search to marry storytelling with formal, pictorial invention.

1 Jean Genet, The Studio of Giacometti

// FREE EXHIBITION EVENTS

THURS 11 JAN 5-9PM // OPENING NIGHT + PERFORMANCE EVENING

SAT 27 JAN // ARTISTS LUNCHTIME CRIT // LED BY GRANT FOSTER

SAT 3 FEB // FAMILY ART FUN DAY // PAINTING A BIT OF MY LIFE

SAT 17 FEB // STUART BRISLEY PERFORMANCE // INTERREGNUM

SAT 24 FEB // ARTISTS LUNCHTIME CRIT // LED BY VANESSA MITTER + BEN WESTLEY CLARKE

SAT 24 FEB // ENDPAPERS READING GROUP // THIEVES + THEORY

What to expect? Toggle

CuratorsToggle

Ben Westley Clarke

Vanessa Mitter

Exhibiting artistsToggle

David Harrison

Ben Westley Clarke

Aliki Krikidi

Stuart Brisley

Robin Bale

jackcatling

Denzil Forrester

Melissa Kime

Babette Semmer

Grant Foster

Lucy Stein

Vanessa Mitter

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