In The City

About

Bringing together the work of nine established painters responding to the urban environment, this exhibition comes to the Stephen Lawrence Gallery from East Gallery, Norwich University of the Arts, and features imagery of cities in the UK, Bangladesh, France, Canada, Myanmar, the USA, and India.

More than half of the world’s population now lives in cities and artists have long represented city life in their work, from the painters of Dutch street scenes and interiors to twentieth-century British artists such as Bomberg and Sickert.

In this exhibition, the ever-changing contemporary urban environment is captured through the practice of painting, transforming and combining source material from different media such as photographs, images from newspapers, the internet as well as drawings and sketches.

The exhibition’s international scope registers the impact of global mobility and communications on artists’ sense of place. The artists give us oblique glimpses of their experience of different urban environments across three continents: Toronto and New York, Bangladesh and India, the UK and France, conveying real, imagined and remembered spaces. Commercial and residential buildings, transportation, and the natural world are all represented as are the inhabitants of the modern city.

The exhibition includes a display of preparatory material that offers an insight into the artists’ working methods.