For the first time this March, the Nordic Art Agency will be taken over by the eyes and thoughts of another. For three weeks the gallery walls will be filled with artworks from nine abstract painters with curation by British collage artist Jo Hummel.

This for me, as the founder of the Nordic Art Agency, is both an unsettling and thrilling decision.

Typically each artist represented by the Nordic Art Agency has been carefully selected for their unique aesthetic values, use of material and compositional qualities. With Dear Painting, the visual makeup of the exhibition and all its creators will be in the hands of Jo Hummel, who is one of the international artists who we represent exclusively in the Scandinavia.

However, I was curious when Jo explained to me her vision for the exhibition,

“Dear Painting, is survey on painting practices. I’ve chosen works where the modus is highly personal and you get a sense of a phenomenological hunt for greater understanding in the human condition.

Common references are symbolism, vulnerability & bravery, power, freedom, safe spaces explored through painting processes of pouring, placing, scattering, repetition are common actions. “

- Jo Hummel

The motivation behind the curation of Dear Painting, instantly appealed to me. I hugely admire Jo Hummel’s abstract collage artwork. The recent solo gallery exhibition we held of her work in October 2019, Transformer, was highly successful, so the idea of relinquishing all gallery control and putting it in the hands of an artist whose creative sensibility I admire, was enticingly interesting.

Eight British abstract artists were selected by Jo Hummel to accompany her in contributing to the exhibition. The artist selected included:

KAROLINA ALBRICHT

DOMINIC BEATTIE

SARA DARE

JO HUMMEL

DOMINIC KENNEDY

PLAYPAINT

KATIE PRATT

CLARE PRICE

CAROL ROBERTSON

One of the artists to be featured in the exhibition was Katie Pratt, who joined Jo in a series of dialogues around the ideas and responses to the values of the exhibition; the artist as a painters, creator and individual . Katie has very kindly written a foreword for Dear Painting, based on those discussion and Jo’s curators vision. As Katie explains,

Dear Painting is a physical exemplar of the conversations that painters typically have with each other. Often discourse takes the overt form of a studio visit, a conversation in a cafe or a comment on an Instagram feed.  Most essentially, however, it the silent sublimation of each other’s output through one’s own activity, into the communal library of the visual expressions of ideas.  Arising out of Jo Hummel’s correspondence with other artists, this curatorial presentation somehow replicates her own creative strategies.

Abstract painting is a means of articulating thoughts and experiences that are resistant to verbal or sequential representation, at least those best expressed in formal painterly terms. 

Painting in general and abstraction in particular necessarily contain a complex substructure of cultural and linguistic references, without which artworks would be arbitrary and intelligible.  The vision and touch that makes each artist’s oeuvre distinctive is a shared resource in our communal knowledge and understanding.

Contemporary abstract painters are acutely conscious of the sustainability of their practices.  Whereas once art-making was considered introspective, it now strives to be public and an open-access pursuit.  Nowadays many artists view their legacy in terms of social endowment as opposed to a full studio.  We aim to generate new perspectives rather than artefacts.  We want to to open doors of perception, not accumulate just more stuff. 

We view exhibitions as interaction, not as display. 

Wherever there is innovation, a methodical and systematic investigation is readily transmittable to the interdisciplinary exchange of abstract thought, irrespective of medium or field. 

We deposit and we borrow.

Every artist determines boundaries in their practice, whether it be the physical limits of her reach in Clare Price’s implicitly performative gesture or the geometry of Carol Robertson’s forms.  To varying degrees, all the artists in Dear Painting expressly negotiate the paradigms of their subject matter: its structures and its freedoms.

- Katie Pratt

As a gallerist and visual junkie the gallery space for me is a location where I can share pictorial moments of interest and pleasure, seeking out collections of creative expression to share, explore and experience in a space.

What I think I will learn personally through the process of Dear Painting, as a body of work produced by eight painters with eights styles and eight unique perspectives, is to view the work beyond the gallery.

To view each painting as the painter intended as “an interaction and not a display” as Katie Pratt beautifully expressed.

As this blog post is being written I am currently awaiting the arrival of the artwork. Twenty unique paintings by eight talented and unique abstract artists.

I hope that you will join me for the Vernissage of Dear Painting, on March 6th at the Nordic Art Agency.

The Exhibition will be open from March 6th - March 31st in our Malmö gallery.

A very warm welcome to all,

Juliet Rees-Nilsson

Founder and Art Consultant

Credit to Katie Pratt for her contribution, to Jo Hummel for her vision and all the contributing artists.