Picture preview: The indiscipline of painting

An exhibition celebration painting for its lack of restraint, indiscipline and whimsy opens at the Mead Gallery, Warwick Arts Centre on Saturday. Conservative ideas of painting, where restrictions of form, perspective and accuracy are king, should be abandoned at the door. This show is a celebration of abstraction, featuring 49 artists and covering off the last six decades, from the daubs and dots of Pop Art to irreverent pieces from the Noughties.

It includes important paintings by Andy Warhol, Frank Stella and Bridget Riley, placing them alongside major new commissions and loans by contemporary artists such as Tomma Abts, Tauba Auerbach and Jacob Kassay.

“The contemporary position of abstract painting is problematic,” according to the exhibition organisers. “It can be synonymous with a moment in modernism that has long since passed, and an ideology which led the medium to stagnate in self-analysis and ideas of historical progression. The [exhibition] challenges such assumptions. It reveals how paintings’ modernist histories, languages and positions have continued to provoke ongoing dialogues with contemporary practitioners.”

Click here or on "View Gallery" for a picture preview

The Indiscipline of Painting: International Abstraction from the 1960s to now, at Mead Gallery, Warwick Arts Centre, 14 January to 10 March 2012, www.warwickartscentre.co.uk