Output details

Andrew Bick, School Studies: new work and selected work 1993 onwards

1 March 2012 – 12 May 2012

33 pieces.

This was Bick’s third solo exhibition with Galerie von Bartha, Basel since 2001 and 12 out of 18 modified oil based paintings were specifically made for it. 11 of 15 drawings also exhibited were completed in 2012 and all were displayed on special tables, designed in collaboration with architect, Lucas Voellmy. The tables provided an optimal solution to the problem of exhibiting and viewing the drawings in a large gallery space.

The generic title School Studies, taken from an essay by Simone Weil, references Bick’s use of Weil’s idea of wrestling a tradition (in Bick’s case abstraction) away from the conservatism he associates with a late modernism, which also implies irrelevance to contemporary practice. Consequently, a key theme of the new work concerns the concrete nature of the contrary object in contemporary abstraction and the contradictory nature of its relationship to the legacies of constructivist and systems art of the past. Bick’s most recent work articulates the generative possibilities linked to this theme through his own use of the grid as a modernist trope; transparency and layering as a post modernist system of revision and adjustment; and the interplay of ‘rational’ and ‘irrational’ strategies as a self-conscious echo of the DADA-Constructivism paradigm his curatorial work has also investigated [see output 1].

Two subsequent exhibitions in 2012 formed part of the School Studies series. All three projects were documented in a catalogue published in June 2013 by Galerie von Bartha and Hales Gallery, with a commissioned text by Stefanie Hessler and a contextualising interview of Bick by curator critic David Thorp.

In the context of the wider resurgence in the production of abstract painting among young artists now, Bick’s work brings his applied historical understanding and counter argument to practices that often display a sense of cultural amnesia.