Neighbors

Neighbors is the second solo exhibition by the American artist David Schutter at the gallery after Pergamena (2016).

John Constable’s painting The Admiral’s House in Hampstead, called The Grove (1821-22) hangs in the permanent collection of the Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin. The British landscape painter returned to its theme in a number of paintings with various titles, including A Romantic House at Hampstead. Before Constable’s own residency across the way from the Grove, it was believed to be the final home of Admiral Matthew Barton, the retired officer who led fleets in the War of Jenkins’ Ear, the protracted contest with the Spanish to secure the Asiento de Negros, or contracted routes for the trade of slaves across the Atlantic. For his service in this campaign, Barton was awarded a commission on the HMS Lichfield to capture the Island of Gorée, an important historical station in the trade of slaves from Senegal, beeswax, gum Arabic, peanuts, and ivory.

Constable found the Admiral’s House a source of Romantic projection as is apparent from his titling and framing of the scene as well as conveyed materially in his cottony swirls of cumulus clouds and lithely bending trees (in the version in the Victoria and Albert Museum he included a rainbow). But his series of paintings belies more his and his era’s selective memory of the effects of empire and the inability to see landscape painting as a historical form always associated with the expansion of European imperial power. These seen and unseen elements came together in Constable’s backyard.

David Schutter has rendered his own series of paintings after Constable’s The Admiral’s House in Hampstead, called The Grove from Berlin for this exhibition. The paintings are part of an ongoing project in which the artist studies landscape paintings from public collections that have fraught relations to the Enlightenment’s ultimate totalizing principle under the specter of capital, that all of nature is a raw material for domination, including the human. Schutter has “remade” his source subject on a one-to-one scale with like materials, such as historical pigments, canvas, and ground, and without aid memoires, resulting in objects of inquiry that are both familiar and estranged.