Base & Awesome

This publication features conversations on contemporary painting with artists Katharina Grosse, Bernard Frize, Beatriz Millhazes, Kathrin Bohm, Ian Davenport and George Shaw. These artists are linked as practitioners ‘who happen to use paint’, but also share a less obvious but nevertheless significant approach to making and exhibiting art. This lies in ideas of the ‘everyday’, a theme that is reflected in their various methods of production and reception, and in the ways their work challenges the highbrow, hierarchical posturing of painting over other media. Instead, their practice – from the broad improvisations of Grosse to the meticulous figuration of Shaw, from the intriguing pragmatism of Davenport to the Brazilian baroque of Milhazes – can be viewed in an open and more expansive ‘everyday’ context.

Brought together in this publication through transcripts of conversations between the artists themselves and Ikon Director, Jonathan Watkins, and talks given by the artists at Ikon in 2001, the texts presented here reflect on the medium of painting as rooted in a continuity between experiences inside and outside art galleries and museums.

As well as a foreword by Jonathan Watkin and an afterword from Yvonne Hindle, artist and lecturer in Fine Art at University of Central England, Birmingham, the publication also includes full colour photographs of each of the artists’ work and of the processes behind the installations they produced in collaboration with Ikon from 2001-2004.