Hayward Gallery, Southbank Centre presents Mixing It Up: Painting Today

Mixing It Up: Painting Today explores the work of 31 artists who treat the canvas as a site of assemblage, a landing pad where references and stylistic tropes converge from diverse territories and time periods. Featuring three generations of artists, the exhibition reflects an increasing interest in painting as a medium in which things can be mixed up as in no other art form. The participating painters share an interest in making pictures that slide between existing categories and genres, and that often oscillate between observation and invention, depiction and allegory, illusion and materiality. In this age of electronic media, when arguments are routinely advanced that painting is an analogue anachronism, a relic without relevance, the artists in Mixing It Up offer a contrary point of view: that painting might actually be the most relevant “technology” for making art in an era when the consumption of images has become a daily activity practiced with almost religious devotion.

Approaching their medium as a platform for speculative thinking and unexpected conversations, the artists in Mixing It Up commingle elements from a heterogenous range of sources including advertising, fashion, pop music, viral memes, medical manuals, vernacular and documentary photography and cinema, as well as art history. On a single canvas an artist might combine allusions to both fictitious and actual events; evoke interior and exterior states; and through the use of colour and composition suggest correspondences and connections between things we might never normally link. Gravity and wit, intellect and sensual delight are inextricably joined up in these works. In addition, many of the artists in the exhibition play with painting’s paradoxical status as a material image. Even as they deploy the medium’s capacity for conjuring illusionistic volume and spatial depth, their works playfully recalibrate our sense of painting’s dual status as both object and picture.

A number of artists in Mixing It Up juggle tropes and pictorial elements from different historical eras in order to engineer a kind of “temporal gaslighting” that unsettles our ability to place a picture in a recognisable framework. Others explore the canvas as an arena of interchange and slippage between subjective and objective perspectives. Exploring fissures in conventional ways of looking and thinking, including our conceptions of gender, race and identity, their works hint at different ways of thinking about the relationship between individual and collective identities, as well as between self and other.

In “mixing it up,” this approach to painting is concerned above all with forging images that are resonantly ambiguous. This ambiguity extends to the manner in which these paintings engage us in disparate ways at the same time—pulling us closer and pushing us away, simultaneously arousing and frustrating our desire to understand exactly what they are up to. Pointedly inviting viewers to recruit their own imaginations in working out different possible interpretations, these works often question how their social reception might shift among varied audiences. Ultimately this kind of painting seeks to undercut any simplistic reading of pictorial content; by mining the medium’s multiplicity, it reminds us that a painting’s subject matter is never reducible to imagery but emerges from the complex resonance and friction generated by its interlayering of disparate references and formal relationships.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue with original texts by Jeremy Atherton Lin, Martha Barratt, Ben Eastham, Emily LaBarge, Rosanna Mclaughlin, Rianna Jade Parker, Attillah Springer and Ralph Rugoff.

Mixing It Up is curated by Hayward Gallery Director Ralph Rugoff, with Assistant Curator Phoebe Cripps and Curatorial Assistant Thomas Sutton.