Squeezed! brings together a diverse group of emerging painters who are engaged in a discipline that has an enduring capacity for invention and reinterpretation. In ‘Painting 2.0: Expression in the Information Age’, Achim Hochdörfer suggests that paintings are no longer “understood as self-contained, hermitically sealed objects but are instead hubs of much larger referential networks.” Indeed, the artists in Squeezed! view painting as a vital research tool to explore a wide range of subjects that include:

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Abandoned, ruined industrial spaces and liminal wastelands; large Victorian botanical glasshouses, the sites of colonial collections; the rarefied atmosphere of privileged white gated communities at the height of apartheid in South Africa; fantastical, fabricated gardens as places of retreat and escape; screens as now commonplace tools to navigate the world through mapping and data collection; language as a key driver of cultural identity; hybrid domestic architectural spaces, shaped by the aspirational imagery of lifestyle magazines; familial memories of migration and displacement; collections, accumulations and hordes that often act as archives of memories; depopulated, domestic interiors as metaphors for the psychology of the self; absurd stories told through a fictional nightclub set 130 years in the future; ecological catastrophe and our continued anthropocentric view of the natural world; the meaning and function of reportage imagery in a post-truth era.

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Squeezed! is a testing ground - a site of exchange, dialogue and debate, and a demonstration of painting’s ability to interrogate complex, diverse and pressing ideas.