Mini — Meta: abstract painting from 14 British artists

About

This exhibition is a challenging coda to the two-part original ‘meta—'survey in Ruskin Gallery last autumn. In miniature format, it celebrates a rich scene in contemporary British abstract painting, particularly focusing on a generation of artists whose careers of up to forty years or more have been spent exclusively tuning their personal interpretation of visual art's most essential language. All these works are the product of an unwavering commitment to the abstractionist principle in the face of dominant and competing ideologies throughout these artists' working lives, from ascetic, reductive late-modernism, to the literalism of the neo-conceptualists and the circus of ‘brit-art'and its progenies. There is evidence in all the works here — no matter how various in personality — of a revelling in the complexity, ambivalence and densely mediated clamour of contemporary experience, where virtual and actual, electronic and tactile converge, and memory, apprehension and desire fuse.