To supplement the fragment at Public Gallery

Artists: Nils Alix‑Tabeling, Dotty Attie, Peter Brock, Greg Carideo, Emma cc Cook, Adam Farah‑Saad, Elliott Hundley, Xin Liu, John Miller, Meitao Qu, Tiffany Wellington, Jessica Wilson, Evian Wenyi Zhang

Exhibition title: To supplement the fragment

Venue: Public Gallery, London, UK

Date: April 17 – May 18, 2024

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artists and Public Gallery, London

Note: Full press release is available here

“Allegorical imagery is appropriated imagery; the allegorist does not invent images but confiscates them…He does not restore an original meaning that may have been lost or obscured; allegory is not hermeneutics… Rather, he adds another meaning to the image. If he adds, however, he does so only to replace: the allegorical meaning supplants an antecedent one; it is a supplement. This is why allegory is condemned, but it is also the source of its theoretical significance.”

– Craig Owens, The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism (1980)

Public Gallery is pleased to present To supplement the fragment, an exhibition dedicated to the writing and research of the late American art critic Craig Owens (1950 — 1990), curated by Nicole Estilo Kaiser. Presenting thirteen international artists working across nearly seven decades of contemporary art, this exhibition will consider the allegorical impulse and its present-day applications, positing its continued relevance in dialogue with the vestiges of the postmodern debate.

The postmodern debate emerged from a crisis of cultural authority and was staged at the problem of representation. For Owens, allegory became a model of coherence responding to the pluralism that postmodernism offered. Such pluralism is perhaps best represented in The Anti-aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, a collection of late twentieth century cultural criticism to which Owens’ contributed. In September 2023, its editor Hal Foster reflected on the merits of The Anti-aesthetic today. Its fortieth anniversary encourages the intergenerational dialogues of this exhibition. At forty, The Anti-Aesthetic bears witness to what some consider the end of art criticism, a default on our commitment to criticality.

To supplement the fragment asks how we might define our contemporary moment in relation to the postmodern question. It aims for a recuperation of the aesthetic, a revision of our relationship to modernity, while simultaneously upholding the critical drives postmodernism celebrated: “appropriation, site specificity, impermanence, accumulation, discursivity, hybridization.” This exhibition considers additive practices that offer a surplus of meaning from the ruins of a prior image or concept. Together, these artists engage questions similar to those of the Pictures Generation, albeit under different conditions and with different terms, prompting us to revise the problem of representation and adapt to the acceleration of visual media.