(contemporary) phantasmagoria 3: Paint-Thing

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NB: This exhibition takes place in the Cornerstone Gallery, Liverpool Hope University Creative Campus, 17 Shaw Street, Liverpool L6 1HP and runs from 28th March - 12th May 2026 incl. 

The Artist Talk will take place in the Grace Room on Tuesday 21st April 2026 at 4.30pm, followed by a Private View in the Cornerstone Gallery from 5.30 - 7pm.

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Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s term ‘phantasmagoria’ which he used to describe the reified world of objects and images- abject or opulent- that populated the streets of modern cities in the 19th and 20th centuries, this third iteration of the phantasmagoria project looks to enlarge the scope of Benjamin’s definition, the better to take the measure of our fragmentary, collagic, screen-mediated contemporary reality.

Benjamin is best known for his kaleidoscopic approach to writing. Turning it to philosophy, history, sociology, art criticism and journalism, he made an audacious and highly influential attempt to find new ways to chart the impact of capitalism on the psychic life of the West and its cultures in the first half of the 20th century. 

In the spirit of Benjamin’s multi-disciplinary writings, the selected artists, under the rubric of ‘Paint-Thing’, focus on the contemporary clashing and commingling of both picture plane and sculptural object. Since the 1960s, the discreet disciplines of painting and sculpture have courted and contradicted, seduced and denied each other. The artists in Paint-Thing re-engage with this tryst between two and three dimensions, rendering it, as Benjamin might, as a site of complex disruptions, antagonisms and mutations informed by disparate ideas from the history of art and the (de)materiality of the life we are living now.

The Artists: Phillip Allen, Olivia Bax, John Bunker, Jane Clarke, Karen David, Matt Dennis, Neil Gall, Deborah Gardner, John Gibbons, Alexis Harding, Simon Hiscock, Emma Lilly, Angela Lucas, Jane Millar, Ken Turner, Haysom Smith.