Another Country: London Painters in Dialogue with Modern Italian Art

Another Country brought together ten highly respected contemporary painters: Tony Bevan, Arturo Di Stefano, Luke Elwes, Timothy Hyman, Andrzej Jackowski, Merlin James, Glenys Johnson, Alex Lowery, Lino Mannocci and Thomas Newbolt. Although the artists exhibited together previously in Italy, they came together for Another Country through friendship rather than any shared style or technique.

For the exhibition, each painter opened a visual dialogue with an Italian artist from the twentieth century. The stunning series of paintings resulting from this highlighted connections, in terms of both ideas and practice, with artists represented in the Estorick Collection, or closely connected to them.

The approaches taken by these artists to the project were rich and various, and the link between them and their chosen interlocutor often subtle and understated. Each of the painters wrote a personal text for the exhibition catalogue exploring further their relationship with the twentieth-century Italian artist they chose.

The exhibition represented a fascinating encounter between cultures. As Brendan Prendeville says in his introduction to the exhibition catalogue: 'It is in painting that the transforming power of art is most evident, for it can draw on what we might regard as a natural and universal faculty for seeing something as other than it is… Accepting that this potential in painting is universal, we might encapsulate its "Italian" realisation in an aphorism: painting takes us to another country.'