World Trade Center

Amsterdam, 2013

The World Trade Centre showcased The Critical Image, a group exhibition by four contemporary UK-based artists from Monday 24 June until Friday 6 September 2013. The exhibition explores the cultural and critical durability of media and genre – focusing on the importance of abstract painting, installations and sculpture in response to claims of contemporary art’s alleged “post-medium condition”.

William Henry’s surreal installations and object-based practice explores post-Duchampian ideas of the readymade and the estranging effects of otherwise familiar objects when subjected to artistic re-imagination and re-invention. Tim Meecham’s installation-based work evocatively plays with the registers of place, location and nostalgia at a time of supposed global interconnection and cultural displacement. Angus Pryor’s expansive canvases present narratives of the imagination – images of excess, violence and dysfunction which underline a critical re-invention and re-engagement with the language of painting. Georgia Wright provides the exhibition’s sculptural component through a range of playfully suggestive and subversive works which explore the resonance of highly tactile objects and their psychological and psychoanalytical associations.