Dear Painter, Paint to me… with Heart and Sense

Quite seldom can visitors encounter paintings in Trafó Gallery. This is the exact premise of the present exhibition, when it poses the following questions: Why might it seem so that painting has been ousted from many contemporary exhibition spaces? Why is it so faintly present in the discourse on art? And, notwithstanding all this, how can it remain a contemporary medium while encircled by tradition and expectations. These questions are posed by artists, who are either not painters, or if they are, they consequently work in other genres and with other methods; thereby their approach to painting incorporates experiences in other fields. Through painting the exhibition also presents a kind of collaborative creative form that was engendered by the experience that the genre of painting, traditionally presumed individual, leaves just as much room for collective endeavours as the creators will. And what the artists of this exhibition believe in, usually collaborating in various formations anyway, is exactly not an interpretation of art that favours individual creative ambitions and marketability. Instead, they consider this exhibition a collective work that leaves room for mundane dialogue on art, which may be interpreted without the armour of theory. The exhibition’s title is an amendment of the title of German painter Martin Kippenberger’s (1953–97) work, Lieber Maler, mal mir … Thus, it is a reference to one of the most definitive creative artists of recent times, who traversed genres, bringing rise to a mixture of conceptualism, attention towards the quotidian, and a kind of sensitivity devoid of any mannerism. The exhibitors crave the same extent of liberty. Painting enables them the same free, unrestricted relation as the “new” media and genres whose conditions are less determined. They view this work as their “contemporary”, using it as one of the several options available for non-commercial art. Thus, the “Dear Painter…” exhibition is an experimental zone whose inherent attribute is taking risks, a suspension of supposed security.