Queer Painting: Intervals
Curated by Katie Tomlinson and Chester Tenneson

Queer Painting: Intervals is a collaborative exhibition presented by Amici Studio in partnership with curators Katie Tomlinson and Chester Tenneson, occupying the ground floor gallery at 12 Claremont, Hastings. The exhibition coincides with the opening of Bathers Bathing, a solo exhibition by Katie Tomlinson presented by Brooke Benington in collaboration with Amici.Art on the third floor of the building.

Developed through an ongoing curatorial research project by Katie Tomlinson and Chester Tenneson, Queer Painting investigates how and why contemporary artists are using painting to represent, celebrate and reimagine gender, bringing renewed vitality and urgency to a field historically rooted in cis-heteronormative legacies. Queer Painting: Intervals explores the gaps and fractures in which queer lives, bodies and narratives have been overlooked throughout this history. Bringing together an intergenerational group of artists, the exhibition examines how these intervals can be reoccupied, reworked and resituated through painting and expanded painting practice.

While the artists in the exhibition differ widely in style and approach, they share a commitment to two dominant strategies: strategic appropriation and defiant play. These artists mobilise the history of painting itself. By reclaiming and reworking its imagery, genres and codes, they embed themselves within traditions that have historically excluded them. The works rewrite dominant narratives from within, exposing contradictions embedded in the cis-heteropatriarchal art historical canon and the wider social structures that sustain it.

Throughout the exhibition, playfulness, wit, refusal and disruption become political acts, opening space for alternative ways of seeing, being and imagining gendered narratives. Queer histories have long faced erasure, yet painting, as a materially and institutionally enduring medium, offers a way to record, preserve and resist that erasure. Here, painting becomes more than a record of the present; it becomes a material site where imagined futures can begin to take form.

At a moment when queer lives remain politically contested, Queer Painting: Intervals insists on visibility, permanence and the right to occupy history, creating alternative narratives across past, present and future.

Artists:
James Cabaniuk
Tommy Camerno
Victoria Cantons
Garth Gratrix
Paul Harfleet
David Harrison
Sadie Lee
Yewon Lee
George Henry Longly
Maisy Penford
Olivia Sterling
Chester Tenneson
Katie Tomlinson
Violet Pictures featuring Sadie Lee and
Libro Levi Bridgeman
Xu Yang