EVERY five years or so, trends in the art world change. And they change dramatically. It is as certain as death and taxes. The wild, expressionist painting of the early 1980s soon became the ironically cool Neo Geo of the mid-’80s, all grids and masking tape. Hard on their heels came appropriation, installation art, large-scale photography and video art, neo-conceptualism, relational aesthetics and a tendency for artists to work across different mediums and styles in what has been dubbed “the post-medium condition”.
So what can we look forward to this year? To divine the future, we need to look to the recent past. Much of what we will celebrate, be angered by, or have our curiosity aroused by in the visual arts probably fell to earth several years ago – but only now is it being noticed, exhibited, debated and collected.
Painting and sculpture will increasingly merge.
Five trends you can expect to hear a lot about are: pop-up projects; fresh takes on trompe l’oeil (tricking the eye); artworks dealing with sustainability and ecological issues; situationist wanderings through laneways (some call them derives, others pub crawls); and the art of the superfiction, where fragmented narrative meets visual art. Painting and sculpture will increasingly merge, as in the work of Jessica Stockholder, who uses colour in three-dimensional ways.