150 Years: Translation as Invention spans a century and a half, placing works by Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Francis Bacon and David Hockney alongside contemporary artists Ann Dowker, Andrew Graves, Humphrey Ocean RA and Sara Lee Roberts. Framed by the legacy of modernism and the ideas of artists such as Paul Klee, the exhibition explores painting as a continuous process of translation, transformation and reinvention.
Rather than tracing a history of styles, the exhibition considers how artists construct new visual languages by rethinking what has come before. Across 150 years, artists have drawn upon existing images, structures and ways of seeing, not through imitation but by reconfiguring them into new pictorial realities. Whether working from observation, memory, art history or abstraction, each artist demonstrates how painting continually renews itself.
The exhibition considers how pictorial ideas pass from one generation to another through processes of construction, perception and invention. Picasso transforms the compositional logic of earlier masters; Matisse reinvents painting through colour and the cut-out; Bacon reworks historical images into fields of sensation; and Hockney continues this enquiry by exploring the possibilities of pictorial space and perception.
The contemporary artists extend these questions in distinct ways. Ann Dowker distils landscape into essential forms that move towards abstraction. Sara Lee Roberts reinterprets the Old Masters through an exploration of light, colour and pictorial structure, revealing the abstract relationships that underlie representation. Andrew Graves's paintings conjure an abstract poetic world of place and memory through the interplay of structure, line and the living forces of colour. Humphrey Ocean pares painting back to its essentials. Through an economy of means, his work distils everyday observation into a minimalist yet tender pictorial language of direct perception.
150 Years: Translation as Invention invites viewers to look beyond chronology and recognise an ongoing conversation across time, in which painting remains a living language, continually returning, reworking and reimagining itself.
