Bernadette Kerrigan, Chris Martin, Daniel Pettitt, EJ Hauser - KARST - Plymouth

Everything That Happens Will Happen Today

25 May - 20 July 2024 | KARST, Plymouth

OPENING Friday 24 May, 6 - 8pm

24 May - 20 July 2024 | KARST, Plymouth

24 May - 20 July 2024

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).