Trespass sweetly urged

Chris Sharp Gallery is pleased to present a group show at Tanya Leighton Gallery, Berlin. Entitled Trespass Sweetly Urged, the exhibition consists of a selection of work by six artists from Chris Sharp Gallery’s program. 

The title of the exhibition comes from Romeo and Juliet, when Romeo exclaims, after kissing Juliet, “Sin from my lips? O trespass sweetly urged! / Give me my sin again.” Essentially an act of transgression, the kiss here becomes a metaphor for painting. Painting as forbidden fruit, as sin, as wrongdoing, mired in prejudice and preconception– arrant cash cow whose complicity in the alleged malevolence of the market precludes it from possessing any critical, philosophical or political valence– to embrace it is all but an act of betrayal (of who? Or what? Art?). Yet closely examined, a many-layered, sweetness abounds, as with the artists in this exhibition. Behold not only the voluptuous heterogeneity of their mark making, but their collective refusal to take the medium for granted. Each artist here practices it– painting– not as a given, but as a complex historical object and tradition which has to be reconsidered anew. 

Notions of good taste and conventional beauty are challenged by Sophie Barber’s delightfully messy, impish and literal inflations of painting and Laura Larraz’s brash and ungainly dismissals of received femininity. Adam Higgins’ meticulously crafted, pseudo-photorealistic paintings of caesar salad and Anna Glantz’s improbable, weirdly Egyptian/folksy landscape both play with surface and facture, among other things, in novel and surprising ways. Meanwhile, Ishi Glinsky and Tom Allen, engage, albeit with very different approaches, in a kind of chromomania that all but overwhelms the eye. Where Ishi Glinsky invests indigenous American lore with a fluid and impastoed spectrum of color, Tom Allen surgically transforms a carnivorous flower into an infernal and mind-bending encyclopedia of pigment itself. In each and every case, one can feel the artists in this exhibition deliberately putting pressure on the practice of applying paint to canvas.