Impermanence | 10 Contemporary Painters | CHARLIE SMITH LONDON, Soho

CHARLIE SMITH LONDON is pleased to present Impermanence, a group exhibition of ten contemporary painters.

Impermanence considers art as a response to the fact that nothing lasts. From the human body and the natural world to cultures, ideas, relationships, and objects, everything is subject to change, decay, and disappearance. Yet art has long offered a means of resisting this condition: to make something is, in part, an attempt to leave something behind.

The exhibition takes as one of its starting points the psychoanalyst Otto Rank’s assertion that the fear of death, and the desire to overcome it, are fundamental to the human impulse to create. The artwork can therefore be understood as an attempt to eternalise something: an experience, an idea, an image, or the self. But the object itself is never truly outside time.

This tension between permanence and impermanence is central to the exhibition. Gilles Deleuze offers another way of thinking about what survives in art. For Deleuze, art does not preserve an experience by simply fixing it in an object; it produces sensations that can continue to exist beyond the moment of their creation. Sensation has a duration of its own. The painting, sculpture, photograph, or other object is its material carrier, but the sensation is not reducible to the material thing itself.

This connects with the writer Hermann Hesse’s image of the flowing river: a river remains recognisable while its water is continually changing. Its identity is found not in permanence but in continuity through transformation. Art can operate in much the same way. The object may eventually disappear, while the sensation it produces can persist, moving between artist, artwork, and viewer.

These different accounts begin from conditions of transience: Rank with death, Hesse with flux, and Deleuze with chaos. In each case, art emerges as a response to impermanence rather than an escape from it. The artwork creates a temporary frame around what is continually passing away.

The collector participates in this process. To preserve an artwork is also to preserve the possibility of encountering its sensation: to maintain the material conditions through which something made in the past can continue to act in the present. Collecting can therefore be understood not simply as the preservation of objects, but as the preservation of experience.

Impermanence brings together artists whose works engage, directly or indirectly, with this unstable relationship between object and experience, persistence and disappearance. Together, they ask what remains, and what does not.

The event will take place at Gramercy Park Studios, 25 Great Pulteney Street, Soho, London W1F 9LT. Available to view Monday-Friday 10am-5pm. For further information please contact direct@charliesmithlondon.com. Follow @CHARLIESMITHIdn

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Category: Arts | Visual Arts | Galleries / Art

Artists: Emma Bennett, Kirsty Harris, Lisa Ivory, Melissa Kime, Concha Martínez Barreto, Hugh Mendes, Richard Moon, Gavin Nolan, Dominic Shepherd, Joanna Whittle