EAST EXHIBITION

EASTinternational 2009
selectors
Raster Gallery and Art & Language

Exhibition
Monday 13 July - Saturday 22 August
Open Monday to Saturday 10-5pm

2009 marks 20 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall and it seemed time for EAST to look further east. Raster gallery was asked to select EAST 09 as it was felt that the Warsaw Gallery had become a focus for knowledge of Polish artists in the west through their collaborations and appearance at art fairs

Art & Language, the collective of theory-based artists, founded the conceptual magazine Art Language in 1969. Art & Language showed at Foksal Gallery in Warsaw in 1975 and have continued to work with galleries and museums worldwide.

The selection was therefore across generations and across political cultures in Europe and the resulting dialogues and debates between the four selectors (Lukasz Gorczyca, Michal Kaczynski, Michael Baldwin and Mel Ramsden) touched the differences and common ground between artists in the new Europe.

The themes represented by the artists include social documentary touching on histories of Socialism and Capitalism in art, anarchism, race, industrial decline and climate change, connecting ways in which conceptualism had touched documentary traditions of the 1930’s. Works also develop ideas around minimalism, personal mythologies and the body, an examination of the individual and stories between the visual and the theoretical. Artists also express thoughts about language and the narration of presences in histories as varied as modernism, terrorism and progressive education.