“Absolute Vision” at the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford

Subtitled “New British Painting in the 1990s”, Absolute Vision is a refreshing departure from the installations and sculptures that so many of the Museum of Modern Art Oxford's touring exhibitions tend to comprise, and is a collection instead of challenging but reassuringly vertical wall-mounted artworks representing British painting in the 1990s.

These are all examples of not only the craft of painting, but the role expected of the artist in this last decade of the 20th century, where having fought two world wars and landed on the moon, the human race is now wondering whether it really does want to dip its toes into the future or actually stay safely on the shores of what it understands. 

Scale and variety mark out this exhibition and the voluminous galleries of Oxford’s MOMA are put to good use. Although all standalone works of art, there’s a division between paintings that are about the act of painting, and works with recognisable figurative themes. 

In the former category are the monochromes of Clem Crosby and Jason Martin, the reductive wash-outs of Callum Innes and the additive pouring of Ian Davenport. 
Simon Callery's work is very large and almost monochrome; on the face of it nothing appears much to be happening. It appears on closer inspection to consist of meticulous hours with something like a scalpel scratching horizontal lines into the beige to reveal the colors behind it.

Fiona Rae, Jane Harris and Mark Francis bridge the gap with abstract works featuring strong patterns, and then getting into the figurative arena we have more intellectually challenging works.

Peter Doig presents Lump/Olin, a baffling, naive representation of somebody skiing on what looks like a dry ski slope. Meanwhile Glenn Brown's work, “I Lost My Heart To A Starship Trooper” looks like a traditional old master with chiarascuro and lots of expressive putty-like brushwork, but as you get closer, it's almost mirror-like in its flatness.  

Richard Patterson and Lisa Millroy top the charts in terms of technique in stark contrast to the monochromes with lifelike representations of Kimonos and minotaurs.

Elsewhere, Chris Ofili’s vibrant works attack both your vision and nostrils with their elephant dung additions, Richard Wright stands out by painting on the wall of the gallery, there's some slightly shocking work from Marcus Harvey, something from Gary Hume, and of course, everybody's favorite Young British Artist, Damian Hirst with a circular two metre diameter spin painting.

As everybody suspects, these probably aren’t made by Damian Hirst, and yet the fact that he’s the reason why they are created and the fact that they do give us a link to the darling of the young British artists remains worth going to see the exhibition for.

All of the paintings in the show have placards next to them where the artists have a chance to contribute something to help the viewer understand the works. In many of them there's an element of what feels like forced irony. Some are long lists of cliquey influences, some appear to be conversations with no context. Some appear to be witty quips revelling in a self-conscious naivety, and none of these do contemporary art much favors in terms of the “my kid could have done that” crowd. 

But whilst there is an abundance of scoffing and a knowing “can-you-believe-we-actually-get-paid-to-do-this?” artiness to much of this collection of new British paintings, there is nevertheless hope that the verticality of wall-hung art is not dead yet. The honesty of the still-lifes of the past may be absent, but there is still life in painters, brushes and pigments. 

Review by Francis Bookwood.

“Absolute Vision” at the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford runs from 10th of November, 1996 to the 23rd of February, 1997.