Is something for everyone always a good thing? John Moores Painting Prize clearly thinks so, but it does make it difficult to do the thing you’re meant to do at JMPP; understand painting now.
That might be because painting is taking so many directions, and crossing so many paths as a method of making art, but in recent years there’s been something clearer about the purpose of the prize. Whether its from the layout, the grouping, the scale, or the direction of travel of the painters themselves. Usually, you leave thinking painting is going strong.
I left this edition thinking kind of the opposite. It’s not necessarily a bad thing. If painting is at this junction, maybe we can start to define new movements. It might sound ireelevant, but movements make good work. They make it easier to be an artist because you’re working under a collective consciousness.
There are strands to this years’ show that absolutely do give that sense, but they’re disperately placed so you’ve got to do the work to link everything up.
There’s a fairly definable gestural figurativism thing going on – throwing chaos into reality. That’s absolutely led by Sabrina Shah (‘Half Full’) and Louis Pohl Koseda (‘Marlowe’s Room’), who offer joy to normalcy.
But then there’s also the social archivist stuff. Paintings that absolutely focus on form, structure and observation, but take that observation beyond skill and into social reflections.
‘High Street’ by Tony Noble stands out for that, offering commentary through the act of selectively archiving contemporary life, but it’s only in relationship to ‘Untitled (Found:Eight), Recto’ by Brian Bishop that you start to see this wave of new ways of seeing and representing stuff that you get an understanding of how artists have responded to the Martin Parring of modern life with scorn. No longer happy to represent the life of others without offering insight. That excites me.
It’s just worth highlighting that, because if you do visit, which you should, you do need to be prepared to find the purpose of everything at the same time as observing each work in its own right.
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John Moores Painting Prize 2025 is open at Walker Art Gallery until 1st March 2026
Words, Patrick Kirk-Smith