The Infornmation on - `Examining Pictures', Whitechapel Art Gallery

What Is It

Billed as a "major reassessment of contemporary painting" (in other words, "is painting dead?"), this wide-ranging show, curated by the Whitechapel Art Gallery's Judith Nesbitt and Francesco Bonami of Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art, features 60 works by 60 artists, European and North American, some famous, some not.

What They Say About It

"As a substantiation of an important shift, as a demonstration that exciting and different things have been happening, it's quite hopeless. Choice of work: dispiriting. Sustaining ideas: nil... There are a few fine things. The Philip Guston, the Sigmar Polke, the Ilya Kabakov, the Gary Hume each hit an elusive spot which is somewhere between funny and forlorn..." Tom Lubbock, The Independent.

"The show might aim to be `conceptual', but it makes no concessions to the concept that paintings demand space for themselves, and that they can command the space about them. They are reduced to pictures, and this, I think, is the exhibition's fundamental flaw. It misunderstands painting's power." Adrian Searle, The Guardian.

Where You Can See It

`Examining Pictures' is at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London E1 (0171-522 7878) to 27 Jun