Genre [machine] Painting
2 May 12-8pm
02.05 - 10.05.26 (also open Sundays 11-2 by appointment)
Andee Collard (Bolton UK)
Genre [manchine] Painting brings together a collection of recent works by Andee Collard that treat genre not as a fixed artistic category, but as a system repeatable, adaptable and open to manipulation. Using machine painting processes, the exhibition explores how familiar visual languages are constructed, reproduced and subtly broken. Motifs slide between the organic and the mechanical; gestures are repeated, misaligned and recoded. What emerges is a body of work that tests the boundaries between originality and iteration, authorship and automation, intuition and rule-based making.
Collard’s process uses computer-controlled hardware and custom software to translate digital images into analogue paintings. The collaboration with the machine is intensive and continually evolving. Through coded instructions, image analysis and engineered movement, Collard explores, celebrates and hybridises the clichés and material traits of both digital and analogue mediums.
Collard’s paintings emerge from a deliberately mediated process in which image-making is slowed down, broken apart and rerouted through a machine. What matters is not technological sophistication, but the distance the image travels: translated into instructions, enacted through movement, and deposited as paint. In this process, portraiture, landscape and still life are no longer simply depicted; they are tested as structures, asking what happens when familiar genres are filtered through a system with its own logic, limitations and rhythms:
a face rendered as coordinates,
a landscape reduced to geometry,
a still life translated into repeatable gestures.
Within the framework of the gallery programme Division of Labour, the machine performs the act of painting with relentless repetition, following scripts written elsewhere, its gestures preordained. Here, the mechanical becomes a labouring body: a compliant worker whose productivity is continuous, whose understanding is unnecessary, whose purpose is the execution of a task divorced from reflection or intention.
There is something quietly spectral in this dynamic, resonating with longer histories of alienated labour, where the act of making is split from desire, ownership, and meaning. The machine paints without authorial subjectivity; the images it produces are not possessions but byproducts. Hovering between tool, worker, and servant. Within this uncanny economy, Collard’s paintings confront the question of artistic agency: what does it mean to make an image when the labour of its making has been ceded to a machine? The work exposes the ghostly contours of labour under late capitalism.
Notes:
The title also riffs on the tradition of genre painting, which flourished in seventeenth-century Holland with scenes of domestic life, taverns and everyday labour turn Hogarth, Swift satire.
PV - May 2 2026
12-8pm
Division of Labour Holy Trinity, Cloudesley Square, London N1 0HN, UK c/o The Florence Trust - Tube: Angel / Bus No19 Islington Green