After the End | 14th May – 11th June 2010

‘After the End..’ is the first exhibition in the new home of Elysium Gallery and will be the only time we will be using all three floors in this massive building before the top 2 floors are carved up into artists’ studios. The building is currently a maze of large open spaced areas and small rooms with a mixture of flocked wall paper and layers of paint and decoration from over the years covering the walls.

This epic show will encompass national & international artists working in all mediums from painting,photography, performance & sculpture to written word, film, installation and anything in between.

Ten years ago the influential art critic and author Arthur Danto announced that art had ended in the sixties. For Danto, the art that emerged after this had lost its spirit and its purpose. The past was no longer a place from which to react against, art no longer had to pit an agenda or conform to a certain aesthetic. The meta-narrative was over and so was arts’ significance and influence.

Philosophical questions abound! If you listen to some, art is now a post-modern, soul-less shadow of its former modernist self. No longer pushing boundaries and rejecting the past, it now just regurgitates past ideas and movements and relies on irony, cheap laughs, gimmicks and an obsession with trashy celebrity culture to get by……..The school of Saatchi anyone?

The end?

Elysium Gallerys new show is exploring the notion of ‘After the end’

What happens to the characters of a film when it has ended?
What happens to a house after the lights have gone out and everyone has left?
Memories become more distant everyday and so history dies everyday…what happens after the end?
This show will attempt to answer all these questions and more!