New York – Mitchell-Innes & Nash is pleased to announce In plain sight, a summer group exhibition which explores new investigations in representational painting by New York based artists Anna Conway, Celeste Dupuy-Spencer, Van Hanos, Nancy de Holl, Timothy Hull, Andrew Kuo, Jeanette Mundt, Nolan Simon, Mamie Tinkler and Roger White. The exhibition will be on view in the Chelsea Gallery from July 19 through August 17.

In the past few years, much attention has been paid to the popularity of abstract painting by emerging artists, with figurative or representational work being seen as limited or overburdened. After all the rhetoric and debate surrounding the death of the medium, why would a contemporary artist still choose paint out of the endless options one has to capture reality? To wit, the role of a photograph at present can be as subjective as that of a painting– easily manipulated and made unreliable. To make new representational painting, and make it affecting, then, becomes even more of a challenge, coexisting in constant competition with all the other imitations of life which now surround us.

In plain sight will bring together a group of artists using representation who embrace this idea, pushing back against traditional notions of how their paintings should typically function. Presenting new ideas of permanence, perspective, scale, and realistic depiction, these artists ignore the assumptions that contemporary representational painting lacks the cerebral qualities inherent to other modes of art making. Instead, they acknowledge that representation as we encounter it everyday is a shifting concept, and painting is now just one of many ways to process an image.