‘The more fearful the world becomes, the more art becomes abstract’. Paul Klee’s observation, in 1915, remains vital today. Especially so for Graham Contemporary, a gallery dedicated to transcending fear, side-stepping populism, holding fast to the healing power of art.
If in a time of radical uncertainty and panic we cling doggedly to what we know, then Graham Contemporary has consistently prioritized those artists who understand art as a visionary tool. This view is shared by the celebrated art critic, Jerry Saltz. In his ‘Manifesto’ Saltz declares that art – abstract art in particular – ‘is one of the greatest visionary tools ever invented by human beings to imagine, decipher, and depict the world’. It is this instinctive-emotive-lateral access that fine art provides, and which Graham Contemporary has placed centre-stage. After Saltz, this gallery and cultural economy ‘sidesteps naming or mere description … disenchants, re-enchants, detoxifies, destabilises, resists closure, slows perception, and increases our grasp of the world’.
Given the noisome nature of the world, predictive bombast, ideological jockeying, rage-violencedespair, all the more do we need to understand the art world as a contemplative zone in which the individual, freed from scrutiny, can enter their own inner sanctum. For as Laura Cumming eloquently declares in her rousing study of Dutch art, Thunderclap, ‘Our seeing of the world never stands still, never stops moving between one thing and another, between this sight and that sight and the source of sight itself. Everything we look at is seen in relation to ourselves’. And yet, how easily is the right-to-self denied to us? How rarely are we allowed what Friedrich Nietzsche called a courage without witnesses?
Graham Contemporary celebrates the freedom to know and sense the world through the singularity of our ever-changing being. If the art presented ‘slows perception, and increases our grasp of the world’, it is because it does not stake any claim upon us, but allows us entry through a silent pact. This is the greatest strength of abstract art, as well as figuration that understands the perplexity that accompanies any claim to knowledge. As the world’s most celebrated artist, Claude Monet, remarked, ‘Everyone discusses my art and pretends to understand, as if it were necessary to understand, when it is simply necessary to love’.
Graham Contemporary’s inaugural exhibition in its new location in Hyde Park Corner – BRAVE NEW WORLD – embraces love as a foundational human connection, one in which art plays a profound role. While the title harks back to Shakespeare’s play, The Tempest, and, of course, to Aldous Huxley’s novel of the same name, it does not share the ironic distrust of the human race implicit in Shakespeare’s or Huxley’s vision. Instead, for Graham Contemporary, a ‘brave new world’ is one which embraces courage and daring, a liberated instinct and a full heart, a point and place of intimacy in which multiple connections are possible – in which love surpasses understanding and value is enshrined tenderly.
Shuttered for nearly a year – having had to not only relocate its address in Hyde Park Corner, but to rebuild it from scratch, ‘out of the ashes’ as it were – Graham Contemporary now announces it is once again open for business. It has restored its pulse, reinvigorated its contemporary portfolio, maintained its core love for abstraction – the art that best conquers fear, best quashes doubt, transfigures, reorients, transforms the many burdens that afflict life. Never inspired by ‘statement art’, always drawn to the intuitive and subtle – the mystery and wonder of colour and form, the uniqueness of sensation and its expression – Graham Contemporary, contra Aldous Huxley, presents us with a BRAVE NEW WORLD that responds counterintuitively to all negative controlling impulses. For Graham Britz, the gallery’s director, art that allows for a triumph over the normative and controlling, art that has the potential to free us. Vivacity is everything! For despite the dark forces that seek to control us and to deprive us of our better nature, art can allay our fears, allow us to return to those unbidden even primal instincts, those deeper repressed yearnings, which override the conventions of taste and fashion. This is the power of art at its best, this the crux of Graham Contemporary’s BRAVE NEW WORLD
The participating artists are:
KPE Innocent