What Presence

Luca Tommasi is pleased to announce WHAT PRESENCE, a group exhibition, born from an idea developed with Daniel Sturgis, which includes some of the most important contemporary artists of international abstraction. Since its opening, the gallery has been characterized by research on abstract painting, starting from the analytical experiences of the 70s, and then broadening its gaze overseas to the experiences of American Radical Painting, Neo-Geo up to those of contemporary English painting.

While showcasing work from the past two decades, this exhibition surveys artists from three generations, who came of age between the 1970s and the 1990s, and who explore various analytical approaches to painting. Analytical here does not mean dry, as we see a range of strategies that include everything from the touch of the artist’s hand, to humorous references to painting’s history. Formats vary from the monochromatic fields of Joseph Marioni and Carmengloria Morales, to the historically referential gridded geometries of Peter Halley and Peter Schuyff, to the process-based pours of John Armleder and Ian Davenport. What Presence tracks the evolution of the radical painting conversation from the turn in the 1970s to the monochrome as a zero degree that enables the opening of new approaches to the medium, through to the appropriations of the 1980s that re-examined the legacy of the forms of the historical and neo avantgardes, finishing with the more recent taking up again of process-based approaches as a way to question the role of content producers in contemporary society.

On display, works by John ARMLEDER (Switzerland, 1948), Ian DAVENPORT (UK, 1966), Mark FRANCIS (UK, 1962), Peter HALLEY (USA, 1953), Alexis HARDING (UK, 1973), Jonathan LASKER (USA, 1948), Joseph MARIONI (USA, 1943), Carmengloria MORALES (Cile, 1942), Peter SCHUYFF (Netherlands, 1958), Daniel STURGIS (UK, 1966).

Text by Alex Bacon

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