A Way of Living is the first group show of the season with works by Varda Caivano, N. Dash, Josephine Halvorson, Chris Martin and Nathlie Provosty, which will be accompanied by the publication of a two-volume book. The first, published to coincide with the exhibition, contains special interventions by the five artists and a text by the American writer Barry Schwabsky; the second volume, containing images of the exhibition, will follow.
The title, devised by Barry Schwabsky for the exhibition and the book, emphasises the intertwining of life and painting, painting as a way of living. Some of those who read this publication or who see the exhibition of which it is a part will recognise that its title is taken from a talk the Dutch-born American artist Willem de Kooning gave at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1951 called What Abstract Art Means to Me. No one who knows de Kooning’s work, with its always slippery, always doubtful relation to such categories as “abstract” or “figurative,” would be surprised at the ironic and sceptical tone of the painter’s remarks. “Nothing is positive about art except that it is a word,” he said. This funny nominalism wound down idiosyncratic discursive pathways that led, eventually, to a surprising dig at Henri Matisse, who many years earlier—in 1908, to be exact—had notoriously compared painting to a “good armchair” in which every “mental worker” could escape fatigue. De Kooning instead insisted, “Some painters, including myself, do not care what chair they are sitting on. It does not even have to be a comfortable one.” Painters like himself “are too nervous to find out where they ought to sit. They do not want to ‘sit in style.’ Rather, they have found that painting—any kind of painting, any style of painting—to be painting at all, in fact—is a way of living today, a style of living, so to speak. That is where the form of it lies.”
– Expert from Barry Schwabsky, Modus Vivendi, or, The Open Question of Form in A Way of Living, 2016, Moussepublishing.
