Gresham's Ghost is pleased to announce an exhibition organized by Bob Nickas, "Cave Painting," which brings together works by forty artists who are engaged with picture-making as manifest within a painting, or meta-painting, practice. This show follows another with the same title that was presented in Berlin at PSM Gallery this past June, which evolved as a result of Nickas's research for his book, Painting Abstraction, to be published in October by Phaidon Press. The project was initiated with months of studio visits in New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris, and Berlin. Most of the artists in the exhibition are also included in the book, which aims to open up a wider sense of how abstract painting can be understood today. The title, "Cave Painting," is a direct reference to the beginning of picture-making, visual story-telling, and the beginning of painting; The exhibition includes abstract and representational works, as well as paintings that exist in a hybridized in-between state, and despite what the title suggests, what might be identified as "primitive" imagery is neither privileged nor denied. Expressionistic works are seen alongside those that are formally reserved; hand-painted pictures are shown in counterpoint to those that have their basis in mechanical procedures; the range of works accounts for both predetermined result and pure chance. Over the course of the show, a collaborative work by Richard Hoeck and John Miller, a child mannequin, will move each day to a different position in the gallery to "look at" and animate the paintings - a strange, nomadic figurative element within the space.
