"I just don't know what it is... is this the future... or is it now?"

A ‘pop-up’ exhibition of new paintings by Postgraduate Researcher Paul Grist and an audio-visual performance by Racket Ball.

Paul Grist will be exhibiting a selection of new paintings at Assembly House Studios, an artist-led community arts organisation located in a Victorian mill in Armley, Leeds. On the Saturday evening, from 8.30pm, the exhibition will be complimented by a performance by Racket Ball.

“The exhibition and the musical performance centre on the pervading sense of living in a time, as Gramsci famously said of an earlier age of catastrophe, ‘when the old world is dying and the new cannot be born’.

“I suggest that something of this sense, or feeling, is reflected in the tendency of many contemporary artists to describe their work as having a ‘liminal’ or ambiguous quality, even if they are addressing a formal aspect of their work. For example, its position between figuration and abstraction or between painting and sculpture.

“I believe there is a desire to escape from old categories, often constructed in binary terms – an impulse to destabilise or even tear down old certainties. But to replace them with what? In this respect the prevailing hegemonic ideology has done an excellent job of closing down all progressive alternatives. We are left blocked and frustrated – alienated from our past and helpless in the face of a future that looms seemingly ever more ominously over us.

“Or so we are encouraged to think.

“I don’t think this negatively.  Or rather I attempt to demonstrate an optimism of the will by engaging with efforts to negate this negativity by acting more positively.  I believe there is a way out into a brighter future, though finding and navigating this path isn’t – and won’t be – easy.

“Hopefully this optimism finds form in my paintings, the basis for the aesthetic quality of the work.  But obviously I have no choice but to leave it to others to make aesthetic judgment.”

About the artist

Paul Grist is a part-time practice led Postgraduate Researcher in the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds. His research is concerned with the mediation of meaning in contemporary abstract painting.

Paul has also been an educator in state secondary schools for the last 30 years. He currently has a painting on exhibition in the Howard Assembly Room in Leeds.

 

Venue

Assembly House Studios
44 Canal Road
Leeds LS12 2PL

Opening times

Saturday 24 October: 4pm until late
Sunday 25 October: 11am to 4pm

Racket Ball’s performance will start at 8:30pm on the 24^th.

Feature image

Paul Grist, 'The Dream of a Faraway Place - To Be in Two Worlds at the Same Time' (2026). © the artist.