Still Life and Abstraction

About

Still life – the arrangement of everyday objects on a table – was established in the 17th Century. Although the Dutch excelled in the genre, the French Academy ranked it at the bottom of the painting ladder, after landscape, which was similarly viewed as lowly, because it did not involve people as its subject matter. By the 19th Century Cézanne was reworking the Still Life by painting an arrangement of objects from multiple viewpoints: this work led to Cubism and eventually pure abstraction. The work displayed in this exhibition represents traditional Still Life, Still Life in the tradition of Cézanne, a double play on ‘Still’ Life - with the figure, animate and inanimate life - represented in different mediums and abstraction to complete the journey. Featuring Jacob Chandler, Glenn Davis, Robert Dearman Alex Debenham, Alison Gargett and Adrian Perry