Review of: Standing Ground: Re-Thinking the Painted British Landscape , Madi Acharya-Baskerville, Said Adrus, Trevor Burgess, Frank Bowling, Jai Chuhan, Jasmir Creed, Kimathi Donkor, Bruno Grad, Grant Foster, Bhajan Hunjan, Azraa Motala and Raksha Patel, curated by Raksha Patel and Trevor Burgess, Thames-Side Studios Gallery, London, 7–22 September 2024
This visual essay explores Chinese aesthetics through an expanded approach to painting, using the concept of the calligraphy grid, gé zi (格子), as a framework to investigate structure, ambiguity and the interplay between visible and invisible forms. It draws parallels between the active emptiness within calligraphy grids and the use of mist, Bó wù (薄霧), as a structural element in Chinese landscape. This structural ambiguity is reimagined in installations where wind and sunlight activate the work, revealing and concealing shadows. The use of folded calligraphy paper in landscape introduces natural forces as collaborators, creating a delicate yet structured interaction with the environment. The form of the visual essay is also considered an interactive, layered space in which the format and sequence suggests a reading of the paintings as code, or notation, in relation to the facing images of the installations. The movement of the wind in the installations is replaced by the turning or scrolling of the pages.
This Special Issue of the Journal of Contemporary Painting compiles contributions from Carol Rhodes: Seen and Unseen, a day-long symposium that took place at The Glasgow School of Art in April 2024. The purpose of this event was to provoke a range of new writing around Rhodes’s paintings, exploring how existing scholarship on her practice might be both consolidated and expanded upon. The conference also commissioned new responses emerging from study with the Carol Rhodes archive, including creative writing and visual art. The following editorial examines the key debates that emerged around this body of work and reflects on the important issues surfacing from this new scholarship.
Review of: Thank You for Dinner, Prunella Clough and Deborah Lerner, Flexitron Gallery, London, 26 February–5 April 2025
Review of: Christina Kimeze: Between Wood and Wheel, curated by Margot Heller South London Gallery, London, 31 January–11 May 2025
Between 1956 and 1957 the painter Frank Bowling wrote poems which have never been published. This article examines two of the three poems Bowling submitted to New Poems: 1957, a London-based publisher of poem anthologies. Working with the Frank Bowling Archive and carrying out interviews, this article explores how Bowling's poems might relate to his paintings and life. This article is written chronologically in the order of Bowling's life but weaves in and out to connect paintings, writing and poetry. The main overarching narrative spans from the moment of his birth in Guyana in 1934 up to his studies at the Royal College of Art in 1962, while also referencing recent works and studio methods employed today. A focus in this article is the reoccurring theme of water as a central aspect underpinning Bowling's thinking.
The aim of this article is to explore the meaning of the term 'contemporary' when it is no longer identified absolutely with the chronological now. This occurs through an analysis of the position and place and role of dogs into Renaissance paintings. The aim is to show that the extent that a concern with the animal, in addition to the potential for the animal's disruptive presence, are taken to be contemporary, then paintings that evince such positions and projects can be taken as having a contemporary register. The works analysed are by the Master of the Augsburg and Titian.
Often viewed as static components, the frame and support structure of a painting are reconceptualized in this article as active agents of transformation. Through the incorporation of prosthetic elements-whether material or conceptual additions-painting is pushed beyond its conventional boundaries. The prosthetic modifies and expands the painting's form and meaning, redefining its relationship with its surroundings, its audience and itself. Drawing on Elizabeth Grosz's concept of the prosthetic and analysing the work of Fabian Marcaccio and Greg Lynn, this article explores how prosthetic inclusion disrupts the primary functions of the frame and support, enabling a dynamic interplay between interiority and exteriority, objecthood and space. The research examines the constraints imposed by these foundational elements and proposes open-ended possibilities for their role in the evolution of contemporary painting practices. By redefining the significance of structural supports in artistic transformation, this study underscores their potential to foster innovation. Ultimately, it aims to clarify and emphasize the agency inherent in artistic processes, encouraging advancements in both practice and theory.
This visual essay explores Chinese aesthetics through an expanded approach to painting, using the concept of the calligraphy grid, g & eacute; zi ((sic)(sic)), as a framework to investigate structure, ambiguity and the interplay between visible and invisible forms. It draws parallels between the active emptiness within calligraphy grids and the use of mist, B & oacute; wit ((sic)(sic)), as a structural element in Chinese landscape. This structural ambiguity is reimagined in installations where wind and sunlight activate the work, revealing and concealing shadows. The use of folded calligraphy paper in landscape introduces natural forces as collaborators, creating a delicate yet structured interaction with the environment. The form of the visual essay is also considered an interactive, layered space in which the format and sequence suggests a reading of the paintings as code, or notation, in relation to the facing images of the installations. The movement of the wind in the installations is replaced by the turning or scrolling of the pages.
Where has painting gotten to these days? Has it dematerialized along with conceptual art and become a practice that only exists theoretically, hypothetically, as a thought experiment? Like most thought experiments, some kind of relationship with philosophy is implied, and here I ask what type of connection can painting have with philosophy? Is there a dominant gene in any admixture? Does painting precede philosophy as a first philosophy? If none of these, can painting ever work with philosophy, does philosophy necessarily try to overcome painting, or do painters have to pick up the power of the pen to become artists who write, artist philosophers, to demonstrate their know-how in both camps? I answer some of these questions through the ideas of Michael Corris and Peter Osborne, the conceptual art of Ian Burn and Support/Surfaces and the recent work of Hito Steyerl and Dawn Ng.
This article brings together a text by Griselda Pollock and a visual essay by Jo McGonigal. The visual essay accompanies Pollock's reading of an exhibition in 2024 at Castlefield Gallery in Manchester featuring works by Frank Bowling and Jo McGonigal. Framed by the twin questions 'What is painting doing?' and 'What is painting being?', it offers a comparative study of the two artists' practices, exploring how painting functions as an active, spatial practice-a doing. The project combines Pollock's direct and sensory encounter with the works alongside a parallel photographic interpretation of the exhibition by McGonigal in collaboration with photographers Jules Lister and Simon Pantling.
A subset of contemporary painting has been, since 2000, characterized as 'Expanded Painting'. This article examines a selection of these artworks (primarily those of Mark Titmarsh, Katharina Grosse, Jim Lambie and Liam Gillick), asking what concerns they might have in common. These works appear to break from modernist self-consciousness by drawing attention to all the paint that exists outside artworks and galleries. Contemporary painting reveals the paintedness of the Anthropocene.
This article addresses a pivotal group of abstractions by the American painter James Bishop. During the early 1970s, the artist completed an expansive suite of paintings in oil on canvas in various shades of brown. Situating these paintings as a complex investigation of the limits between self and other, between a certain aspiration to neutrality and the no less powerful claims of the erotic, I suggest they are best understood in terms articulated by the French writer Jean Genet's 'What Remains of a Rembrandt Torn into Little Squares All the Same Size and Shot Down the Toilet', a text famously published in Tel Quel in the spring of 1967. Special attention is paid to the essay's provocative assertion that Rembrandt's late portraits 'refer to no identifiable person': that they show us the deep equivalence of all men, a commonality rooted in flesh.
The visual essay investigates Carol Rhodes's complex relationship to landscape painting as it was left to her by artists such as John Constable, whose Boat-Building Near Flatford Mill (exhibited 1815) can be read alternatively as an image of construction or destruction, condemnation or rebirth. Boat-Building Near Flatford Mill could also be understood as an early industrial rethinking of the 'deluge' genre. Constable's ark-like boat, strewn tools and transformed landscape subsequently become the wound-like chasm and scattered trees of Rhodes painting, Construction Site (2003). Both paintings question how we mark, shape or damage the world, but do so from very different perspectives (very differently gendered perspectives). The visual essay uses Nicholas Poussin's Winter (The Deluge) (1660-64) and Winifred Knights's The Deluge (1920) as visual landmarks with which to explore Rhodes's unique contribution to the deluge genre: the forms and themes of which are reinvented in Construction Site (2003) with an ecological, feminist and distinctly 'bodily' consciousness.
The following texts are an experimental approach to encountering materials in the studio of Carol Rhodes, frozen in time and place, as they were following her death in 2018. With an understanding that entering her studio is an intervention, this collection of writing resists linearity in favour of an approach that draws upon existing methodologies in feminist contemporary art writing and speculative and science fiction fields. The writing is fragmented and visceral, a reflection of my contact with Rhodes's ephemera. The knowledge of Rhodes I bring to this writing is gleaned from her journals, torn article notes in books, the books themselves, the paintings, her own descriptions of her process, her CD collection and handwritten and typed lecture notes. This selection is intentional, focusing on the mise en place of Rhodes's work, rather than a historicization or hagiography of her practice.
This visual essay explores Carol Rhodes's artistic process, particularly in her 2000 work Pier (Night), through a comprehensive analysis of her handwritten notes, drawings and the visual sources she kept in her studio. Rhodes's cursive script reveals a meticulous working process, incorporating dates, titles, musings, doubts and abbreviations that document colour combinations, records and potential revisions or reuse. These elements are further contextualized within the broader framework of Rhodes's studio practice, emphasizing the impact of specific visual sources and her methodical approach to composition and revision. Furthermore, my visual response as a painter aligns with Rhodes's methods, capturing the layers, lines and textures characteristic of her work through the integration of her source materials. Her disciplined approach to landscape and composition informs my painting, reinforcing a shared commitment to precision and material engagement.
Carol Rhodes's practice will be approached through Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's delicate empiricism or zarte Empirie. Entailing an approach that encompassed 'prolonged emphatic looking and seeing grounded in direct experience', the article will consider the particularity of the artist's own methodologies. As such, whilst Goethe's own way of knowing has certain parallels with phenomenology, the article will explore the various points of imbrication between what Moira Jeffrey claims was the artist's attempt to 'produce a kind of painting that is open and empathetic, alert to the clamour and conundrums of the outside world' and the delicate empiricism as set out by Goethe.
This article examines the landscape paintings of Scottish artist Carol Rhodes as a politically charged and formally inventive response to the political-economic reorganization of Scotland during the 1990s and 2000s. Drawing on archival research, studio notes and selected paintings in the National Galleries of Scotland collection, Rhodes's transition from activist and organizer to painter of landscapes shaped by late-capitalist infrastructure and industry is explored. The study argues that Rhodes's paintings both express and disrupt dominant spatial logics - foregrounding tensions between visibility and opacity characteristic of their disorientating historical moment. Engaging with critical perspectives from Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin, David Harvey and Fredric Jameson, the article frames Rhodes's paintings as acts of 'complex seeing' that mediate the socio-economic conditions of their time in revealing and instructive ways.
The feminist and activist life of the artist Carol Rhodes supposedly existed only prior to her art practice. This raises important questions concerning the relations between art, life and politics, and how these are represented in feminist historiography. This article explores these issues by recounting the making and enacting of the performance What Some Women Did, which was performed in various iterations in 2024. This article weaves the scripts used in the performances, together with historical, theoretical and artistic context, to give an overview of the infrastructures acting on the inside and outside of Rhodes's painting practice, offering a counter-narrative which problematizes the linear binary of her before and after. It uses a political performance practice to approach discourses of topographical realism as abstraction in Rhodes's work, providing a dialectical feminist methodology of embodying the language of painting criticism, in various tropes of objectification of the female body, in order to argue for a feminist performativity through Rhodes's painting practice.
This article considers how Benjamin Buchloh interprets the political significance of paintings by Gerhard Richter. The issue is crucial because Buchloh believes this is where their meaning and value reside. Buchloh sets Richter's work in two historical contexts: Germany during and after the Second World War, and a history of modernist painting, a process of enlightenment criticism in which the illusions of aesthetics are corrected and new artistic freedoms achieved. A current crisis in critical thinking and practice is the result of world events but also how the very achievements of modernism eventually became problematic, aesthetically and politically. In light of Richter's October 18, 1977 group, the Strips and Sinbad series, and his sequence 'family portraits' it is argued that Buchloh's interpretation is problematic for both painting and politics. The article concludes by discussing the implications of this version of left cultural critique and the challenges of forming a positive, practical way of interacting with the history of painting.
