Don’t Let That Horse Eat That Violin

Curated by Alice Mansfield

Private View (PV): Thursday, 15th October | 6:00 PM – 9:00 PM
Exhibition Dates: 15th October – 31st October
Opening Hours: Saturdays & Sundays, 11:00 AM – 5:00 PM (or by appointment)
Appointments & Enquiries: Contact Alice Mansfield (@alice__mansfield)
Location: Cleaver Street, County Courts, Cleaver Street, Kennington, London SE11 4DZ

Don’t Let That Horse Eat That Violin is the first group exhibition by Painters’ Painters, an online network of like-minded artists. The show brings together a selection of painters wholly committed to their medium, who share a deep investment in the particular possibilities of paint. The exhibition aims to highlight the sheer endlessness of those possibilities.

For Verity Woolley, paintings serve as an active site of processing, succinctly noting that “paint holds what language doesn’t.” Adam Rawlinson and Ivan Burdon engage with the medium not as a purely formal endeavour, but as an intellectual line of philosophical enquiry.

A sense of the bizarre emanates from Luke Vinnicombe’s work as he plays with seemingly incongruent figures in narrative scenes, while Ali Cochrane constructs reflective spaces from which the complexities of remembered experiences emerge. Jolie Goodman’s pool scenes act as a direct distillation of the feeling of being in a lido, and Jack Hughes approaches his canvases as crystallisations of memories and fleeting moments.

April captures the shifting modalities of life and landscape in her energetic canvases, reading as both playful and contemplative. Eve O’Callaghan’s works remind us to pay attention to the hardly noticeable, while Eva M. V. Hewitt’s depictions of life in Spain memorialise the everyday. Ian Douglass balance the tension between the sacred and profane in his haunting imagery.

Together, these artists demonstrate the world-building capacity of paint. It holds intimacies and desires that exist outside of language, narrative scenes that don’t exist at all, and perhaps most importantly, a space where the playful, the mournful, and the mundane are all welcome.

Put simply: because painters paint, a horse can eat a violin.

Curator’s Note

“As a painter myself, it’s been really interesting to bring together a collection of work in this way. Curation requires a very different brain to painting, and I’ve really enjoyed the processes involved: finding a common thread, distilling the essential elements of people’s practices, writing, and trying to do justice to work that I really admire. It’s my first time curating, but it’s definitely something I hope to do more of.”

– Alice Mansfield