The Weird and the Eerie

James Prapaithong | Yi To | Ed Compson | Garrett Pruter | Francesca Mollett | Graham Martin

Taking as a point of departure the themes arising in Mark Fisher’s The Weird And the Eerie (2016), the first in a series of exhibitions in the Hockney Gallery brings together the work of six artists exploring a range of approaches to painting. 

Fisher writes that the weird and the eerie are fundamentally to do with the outside, both in a straightforward empirical sense (the exterior as apprehended from the interior, and vice versa) and in a more abstract transcendental sense (the ambiguous and unknown). Fisher suggests that the eerie is also to do with the immaterial and the inanimate – other forces which are inherently tied up in the question of agency. These ideas manifest themselves in each artist’s practice through notions of presence and absence – conceptually, in terms of source material, imagery and visual language and formally, in terms of the internal and external forces that govern the artist’s process.

Private view: 14 January, 6–8pm