A Sofa Under My Painting a group show curated by Alex Stern and Federico Spadoni

A Sofa Under My Painting dismantles the decorative cliché of pairing paintings with furniture,  the interior design sensibility that indisputably deactivates artworks, treats them as afterthoughts or at best, punctuation.  The inflated scale of the painting market has thrown off the supply/demand balance resulting in a precipitous drop in quality, and even the loss of connective tissue between painting and Art.  

In the era of paintings transitioning toward transactional currency objects, A Sofa Under My Painting aims at a reversal of this malignant trajectory.

A Sofa Under My Painting is an exhibition that uses the gallery context to reclaim and reactivate the default / presumptuous pairing of painting with furniture or sculpture.  Artworks are paired in order to hyper-activate their respective impact. The title of the show suggests the permanence of painting and positions the furniture object or sculpture as  movable  - a pawn in the set - the supplement to the painting rather than the other way around. 

Ultimately, objects on the wall and floor are equal, acting symbiotically in-service to a precise installation, and to the exhibition at large. 

Paintings in the show serve as a kind of infrastructure, a continuation of the gallery wall, in front of which to place sculpture or furniture. 

A backdrop, at once softening the exaltation of painting, while simultaneously revering and honouring the power of the painting form as it operates as in relation to everything around it.