The Painting studios are alive with activity. A walk through the building in Battersea is a journey through all the possibilities of thinking and making, artists working through fleeting successes, hideous wrong moves and hard-won moments of elation; the dynamic of the studios and conversations around painting shift and broaden in their agendas and processes.

Much of the work and the site for exploration continues to be the flat surface, with the edges of the canvas or panel containing a wealth of diverse activity. Even in this contained arena there is celebration, provocation, complex beauty, vandalism, representational illusion and the outcome of performative endeavour. Beyond the primed surface, artists have been making their ideas physical by working with glass, ceramics, welded metal structures, intricate casts, installational environments, films and projection, texts and photographs. Throughout all this, personal narratives, renewed ways of looking at the world, and all that is real and can be imagined are given form, a voice or a spectral presence.


As the studios in Battersea become gallery spaces for Show RCA 2011, it is an opportunity to exhibit all that is vital to our artists in thinking, making and working through ideas.