Richard Jackson: New Paintings, Hauser & Wirth

An irreverent stab from the latest Richard Jackson exhibition. London, prepare for another art bad-boy.

Richard Jackson makes art that makes fun of painting. His exhibition of new paintings at Hauser & Wirth promises to be a lot of fun. Even the name of the exhibition, New Paintings, is something of a joke. Of all art disciplines, painting requires a great level of technical and formal knowledge. Jackson, however, overturns all of the formal conventions and sticks his tongue out at the art-historical baggage that surrounds the otherwise simple action of applying paint to a surface.

His method...

Jackson's work could be seen as the legacy of Action Painting and Abstract Impressionism. But this artist treats the painting with irreverence that borders on contempt. In fact, Jackson does not even use his paint to make images. Instead he squirts it, splatters it and sprays it over the surface of his installations. These include mechanical apparatuses which perform all of this messy work, but which also refer back to domestic environments and basic bodily functions. Painting, he seems to suggest, is not a high-minded and intellectual pursuit, but rather an everyday experience. And while his work flirts with obscenity and degradation, it is the normality of Jackson's subject matter that is striking.

To bear in mind...  

Jackson shares his darkly humorous approach to art with his contemporaries Bruce Nauman and Edward Kienholz, both of whom he has been associated with in his career, which has spanned some forty years. It is not the case, however, that Jackson's installations are throwaway slapstick gestures. The machines that produce his violent eruptions of paint are intricate and brilliantly engineered. At Hauser & Wirth Jackson is exhibiting a grotesque mechanical clown – the clown is a regular motif in his work – with breasts for eyes and a paintball gun in place of a phallus. It will be messy, and not an exhibition for the faint-hearted, but equally not one to be missed. 

Opening: Thursday 22 May 6 – 8 pm