Glenn Brown, Michael Craig-Martin, Malcolm Crocker, Ori Gersht, Kate Groobey,
Hannah Hughes, Yuuki Horiuchi, Paul Noble, Miho Sato, Yuichiro Tamura, Sinta Tantra,
Sinta Werner, Andrea V Wright, Floating World prints
curated by Paul Carey-Kent and Yuki Miyake
A dozen artists from Europe and Asia inhabit ‘Super Flatland’ at White Conduit Projects. Some are there as an artistic strategy, either for aesthetic reasons or to generate confusion between what is 2D and what 3D. Others investigate the various ways in which reality might get ‘flattened’ – when it goes online, for example.
There is a long history, both eastern and western, of artists being interested in flatness. The post-impressionists, most notably Gauguin, Van Gogh and Toulouse-Lautrec,adopted the aesthetics of flatness from Japanese models epitomised in the ‘Floating World’ print. The modern Japanese ‘Superflat’ movement, founded by Takashi Murakami, repurposes that history of using flattened forms as a means of critiquing the shallow emptiness of consumer culture. That originated prior to the Internet, but is consistent with similar concerns about the superficiality of the virtual world. The show’s title combines that Japanese perspective with the cult Victorian novel ‘Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions’ by Edwin A. Abbott, which satirically presents the possibilities of worlds in which there are one, two or four dimensions rather than three.
Gallery website: https://whiteconduitprojects.uk/
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