Stuart Cumberland, Sean Dawson, Andrea Medjesi-Jones, Michael Stubbs, Dolly Thompsett, Vicky Wright. (Curated by: Sean Dawson, Andrea Medjesi-Jones, Michael Stubbs)
Sir John Cass Gallery, London Metropolitan University, 59-63 Whitechapel High Street, London E1 7PF
Open: 10 February – 9 March, 2012. Mondays – Fridays 10am-5pm
Private View: Thursday 9 February, 2012, 6-8.30pm
In the face of stock market meltdown, unemployment, revolutions in North Africa and the Middle East, rioting and looting on the streets of London, the survival stakes become high and when the chips are down what’s left amongst the rubble is the last benign act - decadent hedonism.
Hallogallo is the title of a track from the Krautrock band Neu from 1972. It’s a knowing play on the German slang word halligalli which means ‘wild partying’ and is intended as an ironic pun.
On the one hand all the paintings presented utilise hallucinatory materials, colours, forms and narratives to convey a sense of worldly displacement - a form of wild partying. On the other, the artists self-consciously deploy these methods as shadows of historical painting styles; they paint the ‘act’ of abstraction and figuration in a knowing, playful and often excessive manner that quotes the carnivalesque parody of law and order.
