THE TAGLI is delighted to present the work of over 20 artists in a new group exhibition, Le Petit Salon, featuring the works of:
Alexander Aitken, Karolina Albricht, Lucrezia Abatzoglu, Katherine Allen, Jared Boechler, Polina Filippova, Luca Guarino, Oliver Hoffmeister, Evie Mae Jacobs, Kris Lamorena, Christie Lau, Chris Mann, Henry Miller, Katerina Murysina, Jon Ridge, Lottie Stoddart, Andreas Stylianou, Yique, Francesca Van Haverbeke, Tom Woolner, Geoff Uglow and Corrie Wingate.
Gallery 10, Cromwell Place, London, 12 March – 17 March 2024
Private view: Tuesday 12 March, 6 – 8pm
Enter Viewing Room for available works
LE PETIT SALON'
An accompanying essay by Hector Campbell
In 1667, a group of recent graduates from France’s prestigious École des Beaux-Arts were invited to exhibit in the Louvre Palace’s historic Salon Carré gallery space. The exhibition would quickly become a much-anticipated annual event, known mononymously as the Salon. A marker of emerging success and royal-stamped status amongst French painters and sculptors, the exhibitions were hosted by national institution of art patronage the Académie des Beaux-Arts and selected by a juried panel of illustrious artists and eminent invitees, after welcoming open submissions since the late 18th century. Government sponsorship was eventually withdrawn from the exhibition in 1881, following the rise of splinter Salons such as the now infamous Salon Des Refuses (‘Exhibition of Rejects’) which included artworks rejected from the main exhibition due to their then avante-garde style or subject matter. These alternative editions readily embraced the rise of movements such as Impressionism in the late 19th century and eventually overshadowed the original in popularity, considered by that time to be antiquated and out of touch with artistic sensibilities.
However, the Salon’s two centuries of success at the forefront of France’s artistic landscape led to the popularisation of many phrases and concepts which are still widely recognisable in the art industry today. Artworks hung in floor-to-ceiling abundance across almost every inch of wall space available became known as a Salon-style hang; modern art criticism was born after commentative reviews of the yearly presentations began to be published in Parisian newspapers and journals; and an Open Call process of artist selection remains a time-honoured traditional and one utilised by The Tagli to discover a proportion of the artist’s on display as part of their latest exhibition ‘Le Petit Salon’, alongside others invited by the gallery’s team.
A homage to its Parisian predecessor, ‘Le Petit Salon’ focuses particularly on artworks made on a smaller scale, for which there is equal historical precedent as to their power and prominence. See, for example, 16th-century cabinets of curiosities, also known colloquially as wonder-rooms. These comprehensive collections of art and antiquities - which commonly included objects of geological or biological importance, archaeological finds and religious relics alongside preeminent works of art and literature - occupied small private rooms in palaces, castles and manors throughout Renaissance Europe, and served as the encyclopaedic precursors to many a modern museum collection. The prevalence and prestige of such cabinet rooms gave rise to a trend of corresponding cabinet paintings, artworks of smaller size that still typically depicted full figures, landscapes or large-scale scenes, their subject matter not limited by the diminution of the works themselves. In fact, due to the necessary precision and skill needed in their painting - perhaps best epitomised in examples by Raphael or Elsheimer - these artworks were equally as sought after and lauded as their larger counterparts.
In keeping with the variety found in classical Renaissance wonder-rooms, The Tagli’s exhibition presents paintings both figurative and abstract; sculptures of aluminium, ceramic and sterling silver; reliefs in resin and concrete; drawings adjacent to photographs; and moving image artworks alongside monoprints. And just like their cabinet antecedents, the reduced size of each artwork by no means diminishes their ability to tackle large concepts. Luca Guarino’s drawings explore the ever-increasing impingement of the digital on our physical world; Chriss Mann’s photographs expose the finest of lines between reality and imagination; and Yique’s public interventions and their subsequent documentation offer much-needed criticism of systemic societal failings.
Elsewhere, artists embrace the sentimentality of the smaller scale to spotlight those mundane everyday moments of subtle significance, such as Polina Filippova’s moving image studies of often overlooked acts of service; Katerina Murysina’s search for unique yet universal shared experiences; or Katherine Allen’s contemplation of daily domesticity. Other exhibited artists employ the smaller stature to play with perceived compositional constraints, such as Kris Lamorena’s ceramic portraits that become devotional and shrine-line thanks to their size; Lucrezia Abatzoglu’s experimentation with the traditional boundaries of the picture plane to imply unseen expansion or convey confinement; and Evie Mae Jacobs cropped compositions of suggestive surfaces that elicit instant intimacy.
Indeed, what all the artworks included in ‘Le Petit Salon’ have in common is their capacity for prolonged, personal engagement. Viewer and viewed meet each other on equal footing, the audience encouraged to lean in, inspect and interact with artworks that evoke attention precisely because of their shared scale, not in spite of it.