Year Zero

"If being modern means up-to-date, then at numerous times in the course of modern art’s evolution the ‘latest thing’ was to look back. This was true for Picasso in 1915, when he began to pastiche the style of the great academic painter Ingres, and it was true again in the 1980s, when contemporary artists such as David Salle started to appropriate images from the old masters." Glenn D Lowry, Director, Museum of Modern Art, New York

Luke Caulfield, Lali Chetwynd, Alan Michael, Zoë Mendelson, David Salle, Daniel Sinsel, Markus Vater, Richard Wathen

'Year Zero' brings together a new generation of painters who draw upon historical imagery and idioms to speak about the present. The artists revitalise the tradition of modern painting that runs through Picasso, Picabia and David Salle, in contrast to that connecting Malevich with Frank Stella, Yves Klein with Robert Ryman, and Daniel Buren with Alan Charlton. Salle, here, is a precursor and point of orientation for the younger generation. Rather than attempting to create a pictorial ‘year zero’, the artists respond to the extraordinary proliferation of images characterising modern visual culture by resignifying the outmoded, forgotten, archaic, or arcane. Plundering the world of images from the past to create new narratives about art and its place in the world, the artists find that “there are revolutionary energies in ‘the outmoded’”, as Walter Benjamin argued.

At the height of the French Revolution, Robespierre’s government marked a decisive breach with the ancién régime by founding a new calendar. This new form of time, the Thermidorian calendar, signalled a radical break with the past and the introduction of an entirely new order. The proto-modernist ideal of starting history afresh meant that 1792 became ‘Year Zero’, and the past a blank ‘tabula rasa’. By contrast, the artists here perceive the past not as a unidirectional path, but as if fluid or mercurial. Theirs, we might say, is a liquid history.

Year Zero

Künstler: Luke Caulfield, Spartacus Chetwynd, Alan Michael, Zoe Mendelson, David Salle, Daniel Sinsel, Markus Vater, Richard Wathen