A Sunday Afternoon in 2022

Exhibition Opening: 6:00 - 8:00pm, Thursday 25th August 2022. 

Studio Gallery - 3-7 Danks Street, Waterloo, NSW

Exhibition runs from: 25th August - 9th September 2022

Gallery hours : Monday - Friday 10 - 5pm, Weekends 10 - 5pm

The history of art is anything but linear: a tumble dryer loaded with styles, genres, themes and theories, one toppling the other as they spin in perpetuity. Whilst Impressionism was a movement born in 19th century France, its tenets, both philosophical and aesthetic, continue to reverberate through new generations of artmaking. These days, a restored enthusiasm for impasto brushwork and pointillist palettes; for en plein air landscape, and portraits of everyday subject matter, seems a reaction to our increasingly digitised contemporary. In all the confusion of the tech age, Impressionism offers one a chance to escape into the mundane, to ground oneself momentarily in time, place and identity. Studio Gallery presents A Sunday Afternoon in 2022: a study of artists whose Contemporary practice, whether consciously or not, is contributing to the revival of Impressionism now.

Initially a response to the academic standards and rigid classicism of ‘Salon’ painting that reigned in Europe until the mid 19th century, Impressionism offered artists a literal breath of fresh air. Freed from regurgitating stylised episodes of history and mythology, artists abandoned their studio for the open air. They took to both natural and urban scenery to capture, consider and celebrate instances of day to day life, as experienced by the middle and lower classes. Century old traditions of balance, symmetry and proportion were forsaken in an attempt to paint forms not in their idealised perfection, but rather in their subjective appreciation: their imperfect and fluid essence. Pioneering this movement, figures such as Edouard Manet, Edgar Degas, Bertha Morisot, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Mary Cassatt and Claude Monet approached the streets of Paris without inhibition, bottling its animism through dynamic compositions of colour, form and movement.

In the latter half of the nineteenth century, Neo-impressionism sought a heightened romanticism and spontaneity on the canvas, with new endeavours into the science of colour optics. Pointillism thus developed, catalysing the stylistic flair of modernist figureheads, Georges Seurat, Vincent Van Gogh, Camille Pissaro and Henri Mattise. In 2022, echoes of the techniques, themes and colour theory that canonised Georges Seurat’s, ‘A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, 1884-1886,’ can be discovered in Contemporary practice. The cornerstones of Impressionism, Neo-Impressionism and Pointillism live on, albeit reincarnated through a 21st century lens. Impressionism now is a gamut of styles, themes, ideologies and media, simply connected through an ongoing focus on subjects of the everyday. Each artist approaches aspects of Impressionism esoterically, which is precisely what initially defined the movement and its defiance of a conservative aesthetic norm.