‘Paint(consum)ing’ - Was an Exhibition at The Function Suite, 25 West Ham Lane, London, E15 4PH.

It was open from 30/06/22 – 07/07/22.

It featured Lucy Evetts, Mandy Franca, Adam Glibery, Aleksander Mechlinski, Antonio Parker Rees, Cyrus Shroff

Curated by Alexander Harding


Appreciating the multiplicity of images, surfaces and screens within our culture is overwhelming. The vibrancy, and frequency of data that flutters and dives from the phone in your pocket to digital billboards, clashing against buses racing past, can go unnoticed because it is so ever-present. This visual noise is reminiscent of how images across history are now equalised, each as readily available in digital spaces.

The changed distribution and mediation of images has rendered history as a level platform. Painting, in response to this world where everything is available, all the time, provides artists with a methodology to repeat, digest and reflect on images, reproducing them to mediate on their power and referentiality. Like recounting a story again and again or chewing gum until the flavour goes away.

Projecting an image of vitality onto the medium, ‘Painting is eating itself’, through the employment of memetic references, quotations and signs pulled from history. It is a reflection of recent Prosumer capitalism, a Prosumer being an individual that produces as well as one that consumes; think uploading and watching videos on YouTube or scanning your items at a self-checkout.

This instance of painting as a mode of production, including appropriation and the assimilation of idiosyncratic references as part of the art-making process, is indicative of painting itself being an act of consumption.

‘Paint(consum)ing’ is an exhibition exploring contemporary painting practice and it’s expanded fields, reflecting our networked culture and its systems of exchange.

Exhibition photography by Fergus Carmichael