A Room Hung With Thoughts: British Painting Now: Curated by Tom Morton

The title of the exhibition echoes an observation attributed to the seminal eighteenth-century British painter and theorist Sir Joshua Reynolds, that “a room hung with pictures is a room hung with thoughts”. Unpack these words, and what emerges is an insistence that making (and viewing) images is an activity that engages not only the eye, but also the mind. They remind us that a painting is set of ideas, given visual form.

Placed into dialogue in the Green Family Art Foundation’s exhibition spaces, the forty works (or “thoughts”) in the show come together to provide visitors with an insight into British painting today—many of its key established and emerging voices, its multiple positions and vectors, and its vibrant, often unruly, and perennially questing energy. Here, figuration meets abstraction, the everyday meets the fantastical, and themes, concepts, and atmospheres play off and enrich each other in a unique cross section of contemporary painting practice.