Curated by Scottish artist Caroline Walker, The Painted Room brings together UK-based artists exploring the interior through a spectrum of distinctive styles, capturing moments of dramatic tension in the domestic sphere, quiet scenes steeped in nostalgia, and gestural, impressionistic representations of life behind closed doors. As an artist concerned with domestic spaces and the underrepresented labour of women in the workspace, Walker has assembled a group of artists whose work resonates with her own, creating a new dialogue on the role of the interior in contemporary painting.
The artists in The Painted Room all approach the wide-ranging subject of interiors in their work using distinctive approaches to paint handling and individual creative voices, from the naturalistically observed spaces described in the paintings of Anna Freeman Bentley, Mike Silva, Caroline Walker and Elena Rivera-Montanes to Gareth Cadwallader's highly constructed and meticulously executed interiors.
The spaces created by Nick Goss, Minyoung Choi, Andrew Cranston, Cece Philips and Hettie Inniss sit somewhere perhaps in the middle, while employing elements of realism, they also appear to materialise from a place of memory and the imaginary.
Walker notes, "The paintings in the exhibition explore the possibility of the interior; as a place of refuge from which to view the outside world, a personal space for memory and longing through the objects which inhabit it, or a site of constructed reality."
The interiors range from private scenes of homelife, a film set located in a museum that was once a house, the interior of a cafe and other much less locatable spaces, some suggesting the idea of an interior rather than anywhere specific. What they all share though is a sense of the everyday, of interiors that envelop the stuff of daily life, and the purpose of capturing this in paint is either to document, elevate, imbue with narrative or transform the way we see these spaces.
A new publication will be published on the occasion of this exhibition, available in December 2023.
GRIMM is an international contemporary art gallery with locations in Amsterdam (NL), London (UK) and New York, NY (US). Since launching in 2005, it has been the gallery’s mission to represent and support emerging and mid-career artists who work in a diverse range of media. The gallery represents over 36 international artists, and in addition to its exhibitions programme, museum presentations and international art fairs, GRIMM maintains a popular publications series offering critical insight into its artists’ practices. GRIMM is a proud member of the International Galleries Alliance (IGA), Dutch Galleries Association (NGA) and the Gallery Climate Coalition (GCC).
