A New Spirit Then, A New Spirit Now, 1981-2018

The exhibition revisits the art show A New Spirit in Painting, held at the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 1981, co-curated by Norman Rosenthal, Christos Joachimides and Nicholas Serota. This exhibition wanted to reflect on the role of painting, showcasing more than 150 works by different generations of painters. The show exhibited artists that rose to international fame during the 60s, like Lucian Freud, Frank Stella, and Cy Twombly, members of older generations such as Francis Bacon, Willem de Kooning, and Pablo Picasso, and presented young Italian and German painters including Francesco Clemente, and Gerhard Richter. In A New Spirit Then, A New Spirit Now, 1981 – 2018, curated again by Norman Rosenthal, the status of painting is further investigated, questioning the role of personal and collective memory in the current conception of the medium. The new exhibition features artists already exhibited in 1981, besides new ones, living and working today. It is staged across two of Almine Rech Gallery’s spaces, in London and New York: here, the exhibition presented historical paintings from the 1980s. In London, the exhibition expands with works made by the same artists after the year 2000.