Bringing together thirteen emerging artists between the ages of 16-25, the Barbican’s latest exhibition, It All Comes Down, explores how young people navigate the world and approach their artistic practise during the pandemic.
In the final postcard of her series, Rochelle Roberts reflects on the last few months since the first lockdown, and finds comfort and hope in the artwork of Somaya Critchlow and Dorothea Tanning’s Interior with Sudden Joy, 1951.
Majella Mark looks back to her own artwork, The Return, 2020, a celebration of African ancestry, and asks where can black men and women go to be safe in light of the murders of George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery?
In Luchita Hurtado’s paintings, the nude female body is an affirmation of the self, a locus of solitude and personal care that reminds us to slow down and appreciate ourselves and others, writes Jennifer Brough.
Kitty Becher takes inspiration from Atsuko Tanaka’s Electric Dress, 1956, a radical and daring work that speaks to our current anxieties and dependency on technology.
On a trip to Berkeley, California, Molly Gilroy discovered Sylvia Fein’s hypnotic and blazing work, The Painting Told Me What to Do, 2012, an image, which in postcard form, has given her hope during lockdown.
Faith Ringgold’s striking painting, #19 US Postage Stamp, 1967, captures the complexities of the Black Power movement in 60s America and the white supremacist structures African Americans were subject to. But it serves as a metaphor for our times too, writes Hannah Hutchings-Georgiou.
Rebecca Savage reflects on 60s Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein’s In the Car, 1963, a colourful work that reminds her of the pre-corona freedoms we’re no longer able to enjoy fully.
Emma Hanson marks the sixteenth Postcard of the series with Tyler Mitchell’s Untitled – Two Girls Embrace, 2018, which she sees as a celebration of black womanhood, Black freedom and looks to the achievability of a Black utopia.
In the fifteenth Postcard of the series, Anna Kate Blair contemplates Pixie Colman-Smith’s designs for the Rider-Waite tarot deck and pays close attention to the Hermit, a card whose solitary figure resonates with our times.
Delving into the rich traditions of gothic literature, sentimental fiction and old folk tales, Henry Fuseli’s The Nightmare, 1782, appears from another world. But not so, says Miriam Al Jamil, who recognises in the painting an awareness of human psychology foreshadowing that found in modern psycho-analysis, dream theory and psychiatry.
