Everything That Happens Will Happen Today

Bringing together four distinct painters - Bernadette Kerrigan, Chris Martin, Daniel Pettitt, and EJ Hauser -  Everything That Happens Will Happen Today explores the formal and informal ways they each make sense of the world through paint.

KARST acts as a meeting point for a multiplicity of concerns explored through varying visual registers. Spanning generations, genders, continents and connected via affinities, conversations emerge across the gallery space allowing for overlapping conceptual and material attitudes to chime. Bernadette Kerrigan’s painterly vocabulary indicates the multifaceted and mutable significance of things. Chris Martin’s colourful works merge encyclopaedic figuration with painterly abstraction. Daniel Pettitt’s canvases track fluctuations of index, memory, fragment, metaphor and mood as they congeal and dissolve into provisional fields and partial images. EJ Hauser combines impressions of natural phenomena with lyrical phrases, graphic and typographic strategies.

The exhibition’s title, taken from David Byrne and Brian Eno’s eponymous collaborative album and song Everything That Happens Will Happen Today, serves as a thematic anchor, highlighting the interconnectedness of creative endeavours and underscoring the importance of unity and camaraderie. It can also be understood as a poetic declaration on all the possibilities available when making a painting - intuition, design, chance, and technique are all factors that come into play.

Rather than attempting to define a movement in contemporary painting, Everything That Happens Will Happen Today brings into focus the social relationships and networks through which painters can share ideas - as well as spheres of influence and access to platforms, such as this exhibition. Through vibrant paintings and works on paper, viewers are invited to explore unconventional narratives and interpretive possibilities that challenge notions of artistic expression.

Everything That Happens Will Happen Today opens on Friday 24 May from 6-8pm. The exhibition will be on view until Saturday 20 July (Wed-Sat, 11am-5pm).

Bernadette Kerrigan (b. 1971 Coventry, U.K., Lives and works in Hereford).
Recent two person and group shows include: The Lie-By, PALFREY, London (2020); Colours That No-one Knows The Name Of - Recent Activity, Birmingham (2018); Pharmacy For Idiots, Rob Tufnell at Tanya Leighton Gallery, Cologne (2017). Kerrigan is a Senior Tutor in Painting at The University of Brighton.

Chris Martin (b. 1954, Washington D.C., USA. Lives and works in Brooklyn, New York) Recent solo shows include: After the Rain, Timothy Taylor Gallery, London (2022); Recent Paintings, David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles (2022); Anton Kern Gallery, New York (2022); Talking All Morning, with Tamara Gonzales, The Pit, Los Angeles (2021). Recent Group exhibitions include: (Mostly) Women (Mostly) Abstract pt. II, Eric Firestone Gallery, New York (2023); Schema: World as Diagram, Marlbororugh Gallery, New York (2023).

Daniel Pettitt (b. 1986, Brighton, U.K. Lives and works in London)
Recent solo shows include: Skeleton Tree, Brighton CCA, The University of Brighton (2022); Granite and Rainbow, PALFREY, London (2019). Recent group shows include Soft Semaphore, Seventeen, London (2024); Coat Heel Throat, Recent Activity, Birmingham (2023); British Art at Albemarle, Paul Smith, London (2023); Cuckoo, Freelands Foundation, London (2023).

EJ Hauser (Born 1967, Peru, IL, USA. Lives and works in Brooklyn, New York)
Recent solo exhibitions include: Grow Room, Derek Eller, New York (2024); Song of Summer, Haverkampf Leistenschneider, Berlin, (2023); Mountains and Peaks, Parrasch Heijnen, Los Angeles (2023); WINDOW, Anton Kern, New York (2022). Recent Group shows include: Run with the Wolves, The Pit, Los Angeles (2021); Of Clocks and Clouds, PALFREY, London (2021).

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