4 Real? Doubt, Belief and the Botanical Unknown

About the Exhibition

4 Real? was a group show which included four artists taking formally distinct paths to re-imagine known subjects. Mary Behrens, Vico Fabbris, Mary Louise Geering, and Jan Lhormer employ unlikely combinations of visual means to highlight ambiguities in perception and challenge belief systems. All four artists emerged from the 1980s, a decade in which visual artists often veered away from being defined by a particular school and rather embraced a more complex development of intersecting and sometimes overlapping styles. These artists appropriate aspects of these 1980s idioms in varying ways - aspects embedded within the formal and conceptual choices of each.

About the Artists 

Mary Behrens, Vico Fabbris, Mary Louise Geering, and Jan Lhormer attended art school in the 1980s, a decade in which visual artists often veered away from being defined by a particular movement to embrace more intersecting, sometimes overlapping styles: Neo-Expressionism, Organic Abstraction, Pictures Generation, New Image Painting and Appropriation Art to name a few. Behrens, Fabbris, Geering, and Lhormer use aspects of these idioms in different ways. Yet all begin with a recognition of cultural and botanical facts — The Real. It is the style of Realism which links their art — each aims to challenge predictable interpretations of familiar subjects including landscape, botanical study, war photography and feminism.