Morag Keil,

Stop Painting

22 May 2021 — 21 November 2021

Fondazione Prada, Venice

“Was the recurring ghost telling the story of the end of painting a phantom problem? And if yes, can phantoms be real?”
Peter Fischli

“Stop Painting” is an exhibition conceived by artist Peter Fischli on view at the historic palazzo of Ca’ Corner della Regina, Fondazione Prada’s Venetian venue, from 22 May to 21 November 2021. The press preview will take place on Wednesday 19 May.

Described by Peter Fischli as “a kaleidoscope of repudiated gestures”, the project explores a series of specific ruptures within the history of painting in the last 150 years, intertwined with the emergence of new social factors and cultural values. The exhibition also intends to understand if the current digital revolution can also cause a new crisis of painting or, on the contrary, contribute to its renewal.

Fischli identified five radical ruptures caused by technological and social changes that marked artistic paradigm shifts through rejection and reinvention of painting.

The first rupture was provoked by the diffusion of photography. As underlined by Rosalind Krauss, “Photography calls into question the whole concept of the uniqueness of the art object, the originality of the author… and the individuality of so-called self-expression.” This is the reason that led painter Paul Delaroche to exclaim for the first time around 1840 the famous and shocking sentence: “from today, painting is dead.” The second crisis is represented by the invention of the readymade and the collage that pushed painting to extend itself and “move beside itself in space through objects,” as noted by David Joselit. The third one was provoked by the questioning of the idea of authorship, or as defined by Roland Barthes in 1968 “the death of the author”. In any case authenticity and originality issues had been addressed by artists several years earlier. The fourth crisis can be identified with the critique of painting as a commodity, because of its mobility, its symbolic value, and its easy preservation, in the late Sixties. The fifth rupture focuses on the crisis of criticism in the so-called late capitalist society, as formulated in the seminal studies by Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello. “Since the 1980s the idea of an avant-garde became obsolete and dissolved and, again, the end of a critical position in painting was proclaimed”, as noted by Fischli.

The artist conceived this exhibition divided in 10 sections as a plurality of different narratives told by himself in the first person. The show begins on the ground floor of Ca’ Corner della Regina with a new site-specific artwork by Fischli that consists of a scaled-down model of the entire project, defined by the artist as “a sculpture of a painting exhibition”. “Stop Painting,” which brings together more than 110 artworks by over 80 artists, unfolds on the first floor of Ca’ Corner della Regina following not a chronological order, but a personal and idiosyncratic approach.

Morag Keil

Morag Keil’s practice can be described as ouroboric: self-referring, self-erasing, self- consuming, regurgitating. Keil’s installations have the bald efficiency of something bargain-bucket but workable. The clunky papier-mâché houses downtrodden with office heels or low-fi glitchy videos actualises her reflection of contemporaneity’s squashing and conditioning of subjectivity, as well as the interlocking of production and pleasure. Beneath the watermark of professionalism and propriety lies a cesspit of personal contradictions and anxiety-trimmed mediations.

Through a wide variety of mediums including painting, photography, sculpture, installation and video, as well as collaborative projects with artists such as Georgie Nettell, Keil’s work often relieve the aestheticising cliché of post-financial crash and millennial precarity. In her gallery exhibition, Here We Go Again, the artist simulated in three dimensions an out of date video game mocking home automation: doors with peepholes open up to doors, walls painted in soft pink and green screen, and televisions playing a lush forest CGI animation from a BBC One ident, which then cut to a blue circle that wobbled as a voice-over asked in the half- droning tones of Amazon’s virtual assistant, Alexa. Behind Keil’s work is the demand to know why we live like this and the impulse to tear it all down; but, until that happens, we wander.

Keil uses what she describes as ‘limp gestures’ to appeal to the impoverishment of self-image, the abduction of the real, and the hapless quality of screen-based experience that trades the spontaneous for the scripted. Yet, more than simply touting mainstream commentary about the evils of technology, media illiteracy, or idle consumption, Keil’s work engages with contemporary reality in terms of language and form. It is neither direct critique nor personal plight against the contemporary condition. Rather, Keil drives us towards reflections on subjectivity, preconceived interpretations and misconceptions.

Her celebrated solo institutional exhibition, Moarg Keil, presented a survey of a decade’s work at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London in 2019. Keil recently presented her third solo exhibition at Project Native Informant, Free Like Only Animals Can Be.

Her works have presented works at Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Fondazione Prada, Venice; Swiss Institute, New York; Yale Union, Portland; LUMA Westbau, Zurich, amongst numerous other institutions.

Keil’s paintings and sculptures can be found in the public collections of the British Council, London, FENIX Museum, Rotterdam and Fondation d’entreprise Galeries Lafayette, Paris.

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