Art First Projects

Writing on the Wall

Alex Knell, Helen MacAlister, Jack Milroy, Simon Morley

12 April – 21 May 2016

The title for this show refers to the book of that name written by Simon Morley and published by Thames and Hudson in 2003. His groundbreaking study explores the period of cut-up Cubist collages, to the monumental filmic narratives of Fiona Banner and the demotic scrawl of Cy Twombly, examining how the use of words is one of the defining features of modern art.

The AFP exhibition begins with Morley, who like his fellow exhibitors, happens not to be included in his own book. His monochrome book paintings and text works for which he is best known, are essentially reductive - exercising the “will to subtraction and purification” (Kasimir Malevitch's White on White painting is the epitome of this process) which the French philosopher Alain Badiou, sees as one of the distinctive characteristics of the 20th century.