#contemporary-painting

#contemporary-painting

Earlier this year, we took a tour of the V&A East Storehouse, the Victoria and Albert Museum's vast new complex in East London. This week, it opens the David Bowie Centre, a space dedicated to the music icon. It is the permanent repository of thousands of items from Bowie's archive, which are on display and also available for personal study. Ben Luke explores the displays at the centre with the curator, Madeleine Haddon.

Themes+Projects presents Light Bodies, a solo exhibition by Bay Area artist Bill Kane.

In Bless Babel, each painting builds around a singular central niche, suggesting the absence of a subject. Confronted with this vacancy, the viewer finds themselves at the center of Kleberg's geometric abstractions. Influenced by architectural and ritualistic spaces, the works in Bless Babel investigate the tropes through which conception is framed by institutional or personal belief. Kleberg's paintings are not interested in objective truth, but rather in how belief transforms our relationship to space and objects.

Like a snippet of an overheard conversation in passing, each of the paintings provide a piece of a narrative or a fleeting feeling made physical within Wang's compositions. Largely devoid of human figures, their work often feels like the viewer has just arrived in the instant everyone has left - cigarette butts or a lingering trail of smoke trailing behind.

Hiroya Kurata's paintings isolate the quiet intensities of the everyday, depicting figures often alone in moments of drift or stillness, amidst gently distorted environments.

Dalwood's recent works reinterpret historical events like Bloody Sunday and The Blitz, combining elements of art history with popular narrative for a modern perspective.