Contemporary Painting: Seth Armstrong

Conceptualism and metaphors and identity are all welcome, but for Art to inculcate the ‘Wow Factor’ it needs first and foremost to aesthetically thrill.

Contemporary Painting when it focuses its laser sharp interface on the natural world and how it wriggles, changes, and soothes is just the vehicle for that job. 

Says gallerist Greg McGee, "It's all about painting and whether or not it hits you in the heart," he says.

"At art college in the '90s, we were continually told that painting is patriarchal, or bourgeois, or moribund, and that there were all these other genres that were somehow more exciting and liberating. We've dabbled with all that as a gallery and it's not until you find yourself yawning in puzzlement at an exhibition that you yourself have curated that you realise that Conceptual Art is, at best, a misnomer.

That's not to denigrate Conceptualism. Ideas that withstand scrutiny have never been more important, but to get them out into the world as Art, they need that old fashioned commodity: Beauty. And Contemporary Painting can step up and take care of that."