History Painting Now

History Painting Now is an international group show featuring the work of David Birkin, Rokni Haerizadeh, Ramin Haerizadeh, Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin, Diann Bauer and more artists to be confirmed

In the culture of Academic Painting that defined European art in the 18th and 19th centuries, History Painting was the epitome. Patrons and artists used the depiction of both actual events and mythological scenes to articulate the ideology of their culture. With the advent of Modernism however, and the rise of the ideal of the autonomous artist, and the dominance of an art culture interested in art about art, the genre of History Painting collapsed. Allied to this development was another, that for a long time the success of Western society allowed some to believe that History, in the sense of the epic struggle between cultures and their ideas, had come to an end - a belief epitomised in Francis Fukuyama’s notorious book, The End of History and The Last Man. But History has returned with a vengeance. History Painting Now, curated by Nick Hackworth (Paradise Row), aims simply to present a variety of recent artistic responses to this unarguable fact.