In its relentless quest for strong, emerging personalities in painting from the international scene, Deweer Gallery started collaborations with artists such as Melissa Gordon, George Little and Thomas Kratz, all in recent years. Each of these artists were presented to our public with a solo exhibition; Melissa Gordon recently held her second solo show at the gallery.

A close collaboration with artists naturally leads towards a better understanding of their mentality and approach. In the case of the aforementioned painters, the impression soon rose that all three of them had 'something' in common, in a totally different way but unmistakably, with the work of Günther Förg. Indeed, we found that modernist aspects such as repetition, process, reproduction, design, quote, irony and scale are not only crucial in the practice of Günther Förg but also occur in the work of these three artists. To a certain extent, you can look at the work of all four of them through the same framework of modernist pretensions, ambitions or conventions.

As different as these three artists and their relationships with the work of Förg are, an exhibition project in which this commonality would manifest itself was an obvious step. A good year ago, the gallery invited Gordon, Little and Kratz to respond completely freely on two crucial works of Förg - paintings in acrylic on canvas from 2005 and 2006 - and to comment on them with new works of their own. A bit like Förg himself has always commented on modernism and the condition of painting after it.

The result is ‘Modern Talk ', a spontaneous, intimate but very surprising exhibition; some sort of visual conversation about the modernist discourse and how to keep it alive.

Click here for the exhibition file of the show.