Alex Hubbard “Horse Camp No. 1”

At The Indiscipline of Painting show at Mead Gallery I am finding that it is the works that didn’t necessarily grab me on first viewing that I am becoming more and more fascinated with, now that I have been to see the show a few times. By the way, this exhibition can take many visits and still have lots more to give. If you’ve only been the once, go again! If you haven’t yet been, it’s on until 10 March 2012. If you just cannot get there at all then the catalogue is excellent.

Alex Hubbard, Horse Camp No. 1, Image courtesy of Simon Lee Gallery

Alex Hubbard is possibly known more for video and performance than for painting (?) and seeing the videos does seem to shed light on the painting as it is less a visual investigation, more a product of a performance. It looks like the horse-shoe/’C’ shapes were sprayed repeatedly at random through a stencil onto a yellow ground, the stencil eventually breaking down from overwork. Made horizontally (some of Hubbard’s videos have the appearance of tabletop paintings, reminding me of Leo Steinberg’s “flatbed picture plane“), a layer of fibreglass has been added, and coloured resin has been pushed into it, apparently you get about 30 minutes to do this before the resin dries. Hubbard has said elsewhere that

The mechanics of me pushing resin into the fiberglass before it dries becomes the gesture, one that looks painterly but is borrowed from the labor of making the thing.