Ordering the Ordinary

‘Ordering the Ordinary’ spans more than two decades of contemporary art and examines a broad range of artists who bring together works in diverse media that transform the basic stuff of the common place and dull into pieces that are rich in meaning.
 
The exhibition considered an approach to art that takes the prosaic and mundane (the ordinary) as its fabric and which, through the action of the artist (ordering i.e. commanding or arranging/changing), enhances the everyday by imbuing it with a poetic reality.
 
The exhibition can be approached as a conceptual walk between two works – a Lawrence Weiner text piece and a Alighiero Boetti map from 1979 – a process that involves a transition through the exhibition from the cool conceptualism of works that order understanding by syntax to ‘hotter’ works in which the everyday is expressively accentuated.
 
The combination of established artists, whose seminal works have established the canon of contemporary art, with those much younger, crosses generations and places Jasper Johns’ Flag in the same ‘order’ as works of those whose careers are developing.
 
Wall texts by Lawrence Weiner and young US artist Patrick Lakey (showing for the first time in London) are juxtaposed with a painting by Ed Rusha and a maquette for the influential work ‘From the Freud Museum’ by Susan Hiller, alongside artworks that include those by young London based artists Damien Roach, Richard Hughes and Toby Ziegler.
 
As the exhibition develops to feature expressive ‘hotter’ painting by Fiona Rae, and sculpture by Jimmie Durham, it is punctuated by moments or incidents by Robert Gober and Ian Kiaer complementing their counterparts Tara Donovan and Rachel Harrison.