Whitechapel trio

The newly renovated and extended Whitechapel offers a trio of new shows: one of sculpture and two of painting.

The newly renovated and extended Whitechapel offers a trio of new shows: one of sculpture and two of painting. How refreshing to find such a bold showcase of contemporary painting in this citadel of fashionable art. The East End Academy: the Painting Edition (until 30 August) is a triennial exhibition open to all artists living or working east of Aldgate Pump, and this year a dozen painters have been selected from over 600 submissions. The range and quality of work on display offer much hope for the future of painting. The rich and ancient art of painting is as relevant, subtle and multifarious today as it’s always been. It just takes a bit of independent thought to recognise the fact.

Geometric angularity is one of the themes of this show — for instance, in the intriguing Cullinan Richards exhibit — and is continued in a more simplified form by Robert Holyhead, with ‘Untitled (shaped)’. It just goes to show that people have bothered to go to all those recent museum exhibitions of early Modernist abstraction (or at least looked at the catalogues), as Russian Suprematism et alia undergo a chic retread. Hanging opposite is something quite different: a painterly image by Bruno Pacheco of a balloon man on a bicycle, rendered in acrylic on paper, the rider obscured by a mass of softly coloured shapes.

Dominating the downstairs gallery is a large painting by Andy Harper, who used to paint leaves of grass with eye-boggling intensity, but has now moved on to something nastier. This picture is called ‘Feast of Skulls’, though it looks more like an innocent autumnal spread of fruits and berries. In stark contrast are Guy Allott’s Magrittian trees, vast Redwoods with holes through their trunks framing landscape vistas beyond. I felt these needed to be more unobtrusively painted (occasionally the clumsiness of application intruded) to make their point with greater aplomb. Lara Viana’s paint is deliciously feathery but a little too uncertain of its direction, while Emily Wolfe’s seems slightly too tyrannised by the subject.

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