1,2,3 Gallery 9 (2015)

Abstract

In 1972 Gerhard Richter declared that he was making ‘photography’ by other means, confounding the relationship between painting and photography. While much work has focused on the interplay of painting and photography, Peter Alwast’s exhibition continues his interests in the possibilities of painting by interrogating its relationship to digital media and drawing. At the heart of Alwast’s recent works are ideas related to translation and the interface between virtual tendencies in the material practice of painting and painterly conventions in media practices.

Translation is not only a formal device for Alwast but becomes a vehicle for a range of personal and political meanings related to immigration, social fragmentation and the desire for origin and presence. All works in the exhibition are identified by the artist as either painting or drawing and resist simple catergorisation of how painting might be defined; line and saturated colour shift into deep pictorial space, while dematerialised images land onto exposed linen surfaces. Show more