BA (Hons) Painting

An idea and a medium

Painting is both an idea and a medium. Over the course of three years the thirty-two young artists who are graduating have had to navigate their own individual course through the histories of both the concept of painting and its materiality. They have been asked to question the assumptions and expectations that are manifest in painting and art in general. The endpoint of that journey is perhaps only the beginning. For a degree show marks the start of a longer and more adventurous journey into the world at large. Through studying at Camberwell, we aim to have enabled each student not only to build an understanding of what is important and most valuable to their own art practice, but also to demonstrate its position and relationship within a broader cultural context.

There is little consensus today as to what painting is, and perhaps it is an irrelevance to feel the necessity to evoke painting when looking at all the contemporary art within this exhibition—but the history of what painting was informs much art practice. And painting was many things, indeed the medium’s propensity to absorb outside influence is conceivably its most defining characteristic. There can be few other disciplines that are as undisciplined as painting, and that is perhaps why it is so interesting to study painting as a single subject area. For painting has an awkward and contested position within the current lexicon of contemporary art, at odds with its historical centrality.

The students on the BA (Hons) Painting Course at Camberwell have all had to think in-depth about how their art relates to these ideas, and how through investigating painting, both past and present, they have been able to embrace and articulate what they each find important.