Exhibition

John Walter, Brexit Gothic

2 Sep 2019 – 9 Nov 2019

Regular hours

Monday
10:00 – 20:00
Tuesday
10:00 – 20:00
Wednesday
10:00 – 20:00
Thursday
10:00 – 20:00
Friday
10:00 – 20:00
Saturday
10:00 – 18:00

Cost of entry

free

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London
England, United Kingdom

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Satirising this new phase of ‘British Nationalism’ in Brexit-Britain by addressing the art and architecture that underpin its philosophy, artist John Walter coins Brexit Gothic as the name for a style that could suitably address the era we have entered into.

About

Brexit Gothic (2019) is a new installation of twenty paintings, each combining a figure in the foreground that emerges from a pattern quoting the work of Victorian architect Augustus Pugin. Pugin pioneered the Gothic Revival style, made famous in his designs for the Palace of Westminster. The central figures in the paintings refer to a diverse range of cultural sources that include the cartoon Adventure Time; the Victorian illustrator Walter Crane; the early twentieth century Italian illustrator Antonio Rubino; the Japanese raccoon dog character Tanuki; EastEnders’ Shirley Carter; Aboriginal Australian artefacts; the paintings of royal Mughal miniaturist Ghulam Ali Khan; the Italian illustrator Benito Jacovitti; and artist Louis Wain, best known for his drawings of psychedelic cats. By using Pugin’s Gothic Revival patterns as a leitmotif for Brexit and hybridising them with other unexpected images, Walter’s paintings could offer the potential to create new narratives around Brexit that we have not yet considered.

The project develops Walter’s ongoing interest in how cultural forms are transmitted. His maximalist approach employs pattern, decoration and imagery to form narrative hooks, noting “I think there is something that happens in the act of painting in which the image is performed, re-enacted and mutated.” Walter hereby takes the meme as his unit of cultural transmission.  The meme is to culture what the gene is to biology - carried by humans and increasingly by computers and other Artificial Intelligences - as proposed by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene (1976). The Internet has helped popularise the idea of the meme as something that can spread rapidly via an artefact such as an image, tune or style expression. The paintings seek to give these images and patterns fresh memetic life, ready to disperse. 

Exhibiting artistsToggle

John Walter

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