ZAUM! On The High Street: The Crosby Exhibition Breaking Painting Apart To See What Remains

I'm always excited about encountering an exhibition with ZAUM's! ambition, where conventional cultural geography tells you it shouldn't be.

ZAUM! isn't installed inside one of Liverpool city centre’s major institutions. The'res no monumental entrance halls, corporate hospitality areas or armies of invigilators. Instead, it occupies 50 MV, the artist-run gallery and working studio established by Luke Skiffington on a Crosby high street.

Outside, ordinary life continues. Shops open and close. Cars pass. People carry bags home. Inside, works by artists from Liverpool, London, Belgium and the United States converse with one another across a relatively intimate room. Among them is a painting by Sir Terry Frost, one of the defining figures of post-war British abstraction. And the location isn't incidental. It gives the exhibition some of its charge.

ZAUM! asks what painting might be capable of now, but its existence also raises another question: who gets to encounter serious contemporary art, and where?

For Skiffington, establishing 50 MV was partly practical. Having moved to the area with a young family, maintaining a separate studio on the Wirral had become increasingly difficult. The school run and the journey across Merseyside left little time for making work. When the Crosby space became available, it offered the possibility of bringing several parts of his practice together.

It's a studio, a teaching space and, several times each year, a gallery.

But the exhibitions aren't an afterthought. Skiffington has long been interested in curating and in the relationships that emerge when individual works are placed alongside one another. At 50 MV, he's developed a programme that supports artists from Liverpool and the wider North West while bringing work into the region from elsewhere.

“I think everywhere needs more spaces to show,” he says. “There are a lot of artists and not that many spaces generally.”

Liverpool possesses some formidable cultural institutions, but Skiffington believes the city has fewer small commercial, semi-commercial and artist-run galleries than its population of practising artists might suggest. 50 MV doesn't claim to solve that structural problem. It does, however, create another route through it: independent, responsive and able to act without waiting years for institutional approval.

A language beyond meaning

The exhibition’s title emerged from the Russian Futurist opera Victory Over the Sun, first performed in 1913 and closely associated with Kazimir Malevich’s earliest experiments with the Black Square.

The opera’s text used zaum, an invented poetic language that sought to escape the fixed meanings and grammatical rules of ordinary speech. Words became sound, rhythm, sensation and provocation. Language could be broken apart and reconstructed according to an internal logic of its own.

That principle gave Skiffington and co-curator James Bacchi-Andreoli a way into the exhibition.

“It’s about being instinctive, but also breaking rules,” Bacchi-Andreoli explains. “The common thread was breaking rules, rethinking things, taking apart, putting back together.”

The curators found echoes of this throughout the practices of the artists they'd begun assembling: the cutting and reconfiguration of painted surfaces; the collision of painting, craft and sculpture; artists looking backwards towards art history while refusing to become trapped by it.

Even the text accompanying the exhibition reflects this approach. Its opening sequence - “procedural, intuitive, contradiction, springboard, confine, limit, failed, reactionary…” - was constructed from words found in the participating artists’ own statements. Meaning is fragmented, rearranged and then set loose again.

ZAUM!, then, isn't a manifesto for a single movement. It's held together by a shared restlessness.

The exhibition includes work by Paul Bramley, Julian Wakelin, David Ryan, Mike Carney, Clem Crosby, Molly Thomson, James Bacchi-Andreoli, Luke George, Lindsay Mapes, Laurence Grave, Christopher Peterson, Jane K Morter, Daniel Sturgis, Sasha Holzer and Sir Terry Frost.

They're not presented as a school or collective. What connects them is an interest in what Bacchi-Andreoli calls “the language of painting”: colour, surface, structure, gesture, time and material, and the ways those elements might be disrupted.

That distinction is important, because the word abstraction can close down a conversation almost as quickly as it opens one.

Abstraction is often treated as a specialist language: remote, historical and difficult to decode. Bacchi-Andreoli is wary of it as an umbrella term. Even “non-representational”, he argues, is inadequate. A Terry Frost yellow may not depict a landscape in any conventional sense, but it can still carry the light, colour and lived experience of a particular place.

“The definitions are not as distinct,” Skiffington adds. The artists might be interested in materiality, physical form and colour, but abstraction only links those concerns together imperfectly.

Rather than asking whether abstraction can be made relevant again, ZAUM! begins elsewhere: what does the language of painting look and sound like now?

An exhibition built in studios

The care behind ZAUM! becomes apparent when Bacchi-Andreoli describes how the exhibition was assembled.

The curators didn't issue a general invitation and wait to see what arrived. They began with particular artists and, in many cases, particular works. They discussed scale, colour, rhythm and the visual relationships that might develop across the gallery.

“We actually created the whole show before inviting the artists,” Bacchi-Andreoli says, acknowledging the apparent presumption. But the proposed arrangement also became a persuasive curatorial tool: this wasn't a random group exhibition but a considered proposition in which each contribution had a purpose.

Most of the artists’ studios were visited in person. Bacchi-Andreoli spent hours with Sasha Holzer, looking through carved wooden works and the postage-stamp-sized drawings that inform their compositions. Lindsay Mapes’ studio revealed a wider practice involving transparent surfaces, paint, embroidery and stitching. Other visits allowed the curators to compare finished pieces with unresolved experiments and understand more fully how each artist thinks through making.

The process involved genuine exchange. Jane K Morter, for example, wanted to submit a newly completed piece rather than one initially considered by the curators. The relationship depended upon enough trust to leave part of the final exhibition unknown.

Skiffington understands the impulse. Artists naturally want to show their most recent work. Yet curating also means considering whether a two-year-old piece might serve the exhibition more effectively than one completed the previous week.

It's in those negotiations that the show was shaped.

The exhibition also evolved through practical constraints. Work arrived from Belgium after an extended encounter with customs. A piece travelling from the United States reached Crosby more quickly. Other works appeared smaller, larger or materially stranger than anticipated when finally removed from their packaging.

This isn't simply logistical background info. It describes the moment when an exhibition stops being an idea and becomes a physical argument.

“You get the work in here and work out where everything is going to sit and how it is going to work together,” Skiffington says. “That’s the fun bit, really.”

Painting at its edges

Some works in ZAUM! are recognisably paintings. Others protrude from the wall, reveal their construction or occupy a space between image, object and architecture.

Molly Thomson’s wooden piece is assembled from multiple blocks. Its rigid structure is softened by veils of colour, creating what Skiffington describes as an almost ghost-like presence. You can see how it's been built, but its surface refuses to settle into something wholly solid.

Sasha Holzer’s work is also constructed from wood - walnut, cherry and oak - carefully carved over a period of months. Its square format gestures towards modernism, but its internal rhythms are informed partly by seventeenth - and eighteenth -century Northern European landscape painting. Light is essential: as it moves across the carved surface, the work changes.

Christopher Peterson similarly gathers and reconfigures disparate elements, including discarded pieces of painted canvas. His curved, irregular formats resist the conventional rectangle, while their collaged surfaces retain something of their earlier lives.

Laurence Grave’s linen work arrives unstretched, folded, painted and unfolded. Its marks are partly deliberate and partly revealed through a process that allows surprise to enter the finished piece. The result has the quality of a painting, banner and tapestry simultaneously.

Lindsay Mapes brings craft techniques directly into the language of painting. Transparent grounds, embroidery and stitching build into a composition informed by Mannerism and her years spent teaching art history in Florence. Its surface feels unstable, layered and gloriously difficult to categorise.

Jane K Morter works with deliberately modest materials - including mud, PVA and paint - but gives them an architectural presence. The work projects into the room, appearing as though it might be folded flat even though it arrived fully formed.

Paul Bramley’s piece has been cut apart and assembled again. Its vivid fragments are accompanied by a politically suggestive title, introducing the possibility that formal collapse might also speak, however loosely, to a wider social or political disappointment.

Bacchi-Andreoli’s own work begins with paint and coloured pencil on discarded brown paper or packaging. He makes an image, cuts it into sections and attempts to reconstruct it in a better form.

That final stage is not guaranteed to succeed. “It either works or it doesn’t,” he says. Elements might meet incorrectly. The balance between pencil, paint, erasure and exposed paper could be lost. Simplicity's achieved through risk rather than certainty.

Across the room, surfaces have been stretched, stitched, folded, carved, cut, rearranged and allowed to fail. Here, painting isn't treated as a stable category. It becomes something that artists think with.

The seriousness of play

For all its historical references and intellectual foundations, ZAUM! isn't solemn.

Skiffington repeatedly returns to the importance of play: allowing materials to behave unpredictably, responding to what appears and avoiding the imposition of a predetermined order.

In some works, the artist establishes a framework and then lets the painting evolve inside it. Daniel Sturgis’ geometric compositions may initially appear tightly planned, but their circles and squares are hand-painted rather than masked. They belong to series in which recurring forms shift position and tone, building what Bacchi-Andreoli describes as “a series of languages”.

Sturgis acknowledges the legacy of hard-edged geometric abstraction while also playing with it. His paintings contain a degree of humour and a recognition that the promises of modernism didn't arrive intact.

David Ryan brings another kind of improvisation into the exhibition. His musical practice informs paintings developed across extended periods. Several works might remain in progress simultaneously, receiving new marks months apart. A piece that appears to have been executed quickly can therefore contain an unexpectedly long history of looking, waiting and deciding.

Mike Carney’s work operates differently. Its marks suggest a performance in which control and risk have to coexist. One misplaced element could cause the composition to collapse, but that possibility's essential to its energy.

Julian Wakelin also brings separate elements into uncertain relationships: monochrome against colour, one scale against another. The result feels, in Bacchi-Andreoli’s words, as though “it shouldn’t work, but it does”.

That might be one of the exhibition’s clearest unifying principles. The works don't conceal the possibility of failure. They've been made through it.

“If I had one word to tie up the show, I’d probably say playful,” Bacchi-Andreoli says. “But in a genuine way.”

Frost among the new

The inclusion of Sir Terry Frost gives ZAUM! a historical anchor without turning the exhibition into a conventional account of British abstraction.

Frost’s connection to Skiffington is personal: Skiffington’s father knew the artist and members of the wider generation of painters associated with St Ives. Including his work gives the exhibition what Bacchi-Andreoli calls “gravitas”, but it also establishes a live conversation between generations.

Frost isn't presented as an untouchable master against whom everyone else should be measured. His painting sits within the same restless discussion about colour, place, memory and form.

That decision is important. ZAUM! neither rejects the history of abstraction nor repeats it obediently. Its artists borrow, question and occasionally tease the traditions they've inherited.

References to Poussin, Mannerism, Northern European landscape, Suprematism, St Ives and post-war modernism appear throughout the exhibition. But they do so inside work made from contemporary materials, domestic packaging, studio remnants, thread, mud and carved wood.

The past seems to become a resource rather than a rule.

Why here matters

The freedom of an artist-run space doesn't remove every difficulty. It creates others.

There are emails, transport arrangements, customs forms and financial limitations. Promotion is hard. Even in London, Bacchi-Andreoli says, exhibitions frequently struggle to reach beyond the participating artists, their friends and existing networks.

Instagram was crucial to ZAUM!. The curators had followed some artists for years before approaching them. Initial invitations were sent through the platform because it allowed recipients to see immediately who was contacting them and understand the context around the proposal.

“This show wouldn’t have been possible without Instagram,” Bacchi-Andreoli says.

But digital connection doesn't guarantee physical audiences. The curators hope people will travel from central Liverpool, that artists and galleries will take notice and, above all, that residents of Crosby will walk through the door.

Skiffington is gradually discovering a local artistic community that wasn't immediately visible when he arrived. Previous exhibitions have included artists living less than a mile from the gallery. Each opening creates new connections and expands an ecosystem that might have existed all along without a shared focal point.

The ambition is outward-facing too. Skiffington has curated exhibitions in other northern cities, and there is a hope that ZAUM! might eventually be reconfigured for another regional venue, perhaps with more work and a larger space.

Yet Bacchi-Andreoli is careful not to measure the exhibition’s success only through publicity, touring opportunities or institutional recognition. “I’ve already achieved it,” he says. “It’s happened. That’s good enough for me. Beyond that, everything else is a bonus.”

There's no false modesty in that statement. It's a recognition that making an exhibition of this seriousness happen independently - bringing 15 artists and their work into one room, developing a coherent idea, transporting it across borders and presenting it carefully - is itself an achievement.

The permission to look slowly

ZAUM! arrives at a moment when images are consumed at extraordinary speed.

We swipe past faces, wars, products, landscapes, disasters and carefully constructed versions of other people’s lives. Images arrive with captions, arguments and demands already attached. They tell us what they depict and often how we should feel about them. The works in this exhibition behave differently.

They don't deliver fixed messages. They resist immediate consumption. Their meaning isn't absent, but it remains unsettled.

“We’re surrounded by pictures of people and landscapes all the time,” Bacchi-Andreoli says. “But often we’re not confronted with pictures that ask you to slow down.” And that slowing down isn't passive. It's a form of attention.

A visitor might begin with colour, a stitched line, an exposed join or a strange protrusion from the wall. A child could identify that a painting has been made and cut apart. From there, a conversation begins: why destroy something already made? Is the second version better? What happens when the materials are permitted to make decisions too?

Abstract painting doesn't need to be approached through specialist terminology. It can be encountered through curiosity.

The apparent difficulty of the work might even become its democratic quality. Nobody's required to recognise a person, place or story. There's no single piece of knowledge that grants entry. Looking becomes an active process rather than a test with correct answers.

ZAUM! therefore makes sense at 50 MV.

Not despite its high-street location, but because of it. Here, an exhibition shaped by Futurist language, post-war painting, Renaissance composition, musical improvisation and contemporary material practice sits within the daily life of Crosby. It's been made with scholarship, patience and a deep respect for artists’ processes, but it hasn't been sealed behind the architecture of cultural authority.

The door is simply there.

And on the other side of it, painting is being taken apart - carefully, joyfully and without any certainty about what it might become next.

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Header image: Luke Skiffington and James Bacchi-Andreoli