IN THE CITY

Trevor Burgess, Stephen Carter, Mark Crofton Bell, Marguerite Horner, Barbara Howey, Matthew Krishanu, Lee Maelzer, Jock McFadyen, Tanmoy Samanta IN THE CITY began as an exhibition I curated in 2014 at the Lion & Lamb, a gallery in East London which invited painters to curate painting shows. For the exhibition I invited painters whose work I admired and who shared my interest in finding ways of registering experience of contemporary urban environments in painting. An expanded version of the exhibition toured to EAST Gallery, Norwich University of the Arts 23 July to 1 September 2018, and to Stephen Lawrence Gallery, University of Greenwich 7 September to 24 October 2018. A catalogue of the original exhibition with an introduction by Robert Harbison is available. The exhibition brought together contemporary painters whose work responds to the urban environment. It explored how through the practice of painting, artists transform and combine source material from different media such as photographs, images from newspapers, the internet as well as drawings and sketches. The exhibition’s international scope registered the impact of global mobility and communications on artists’ sense of place. The artists gave us oblique glimpses of their experience of different urban environments across three continents: Toronto and New York, Bangladesh and India, the UK and France, conveying real, imagined and remembered spaces. Commercial and residential buildings, transportation, and the natural world were all represented as were the inhabitants of the modern city. The exhibition included a display of preparatory material that offered an insight into the artists’ working methods.