“To consider the paintings brought together here as being a ‘trace of aliveness’, through their essential materiality, connects the paintings to the material world of the viewer and renders the paintings re-sung, sensations, in the subjective, experience of the beholder. I hope that the BEEP exhibitions reveal to new as well as established audiences an inner response to painting and its potential to engender Vitalistic Fantasies.” Professor Catrin Webster, Exhibition Catalogue.
Vitalistic Fantasies was scheduled to be part of this year’s BEEP Painting Biennial, in Swansea, Wales. The exhibition is curated by Paula MacArthur and is inspired by Isabelle Graw’s publication, The Love of Painting: Genealogy of a Success Medium (2018). Vitalistic Fantasies showcases the paintings of thirty artists, who are all part of the Contemporary British Painting group. Due to the coronavirus pandemic, the exhibition is now postponed until 2021 but works are available to view online.
The online exhibition can be viewed at Contemporary British Painting: https://www.contemporarybritishpainting.com/vitalistic-fantasies-exhibition/
The online catalogue includes an introductory essay by Professor Catrin Webster. Read here.
In ‘The Love of Painting’, Isabelle Graw argues that the aliveness of paintings is created not only through the specific ways in which painters personalise their paintings by the traces of activity on the resulting work, but also through the projections of the viewer onto the painting. She writes: “One key reason I call these fantasies “vitalistic” is because they imaginatively assume qualities of living beings such as subjectivity, liveliness, and animation for dead material. In a vitalistic fantasy, human attributes – like self-command, will, and energy – are projected onto lifeless material.” The resulting record of the painter’s activity, however energetic or quiet, is suggestive of the artist themselves, the viewer is compelled to project an imagined personality onto the work.
Vitalistic Fantasies was planned to open on Saturday 3rd October 2020, at the College Street Gallery, Swansea, Wales. Due to Covid-19 lockdown restrictions in Swansea, a version of this exhibition is rescheduled to open, in 2021.
Exhibiting artists: Iain Andrews, Amanda Ansell, Karl Bielik, Day Bowman, Julian Brown, Deb Covell, Lucy Cox, Gordon Dalton, Pen Dalton, Natalie Dowse, Fiona Eastwood, Geraint Evans, Susan Gunn, Suzanne Holtom, Barbara Howey, Phil Illingworth, Bryan Lavelle, Paula MacArthur, Enzo Marra, Nicholas Middleton, Stephen Newton, Joe Packer, Stephen Palmer, Ruth Philo, Narbi Price, Freya Purdue, James Quin, Molly Thomson, Judith Tucker, Joanna Whittle, Sean Williams.