Everything That Happens Will Happen Today

29 July - 30 August 2024 | The University of Brighton

OPENING Friday 9 August, 2 - 5 pm

Bringing together four distinct painters, Everything That Happens Will Happen Today explores the formal and informal ways Bernadette Kerrigan, Chris Martin, Daniel Pettitt, and EJ Hauser each make sense of the world through their chosen medium.

The exhibition title, taken from David Byrne and Brian Eno’s eponymous collaborative album, serves as a thematic anchor. Prompting notions around the interconnectedness of creative endeavours and underscoring the importance of unity and camaraderie. It can also be understood as a poetic declaration on the possibilities available when making a painting; intuition, design, chance, technique and intent are all factors that come into play. The gallery walls act as a meeting point for a multiplicity of concerns explored through varying visual registers. New conversations and affinities start to emerge as overlapping conceptual and material attitudes begin to chime.

Bernadette Kerrigan’s visual vocabulary indicates the multifaceted and mutable significance of things. Chris Martin’s vibrant works merge encyclopaedic figuration with painterly abstraction. Daniel Pettitt’s canvases track fluctuations of index, memory, fragment, metaphor and mood as they congeal and dissolve into provisional fields and partial images. EJ Hauser combines impressions of natural phenomena with lyrical phrases, graphic and typographic strategies.

Rather than attempting to define a movement in contemporary painting, Everything That Happens Will Happen Today brings into focus the social relationships, research interests, and ways in which these painters interconnect.

2022, acrylic and graphite on canvas, 25 x 20 cm

All content copyright © Daniel Pettitt 2024