Each looks for the opening. In contemporary art, it is the mutations of art practice that are the most incisive today. The itinerary of contemporary art is comprised of mobile strategies that elicit social, personal and art-historical reference points. These are only viewed obliquely by way of obscure details, permutations, cryptic reference points and inference. Its expression is not one of interiority or of uncovering an essence, but of uprootedness, as though contemporary art amounts to an intensification of what Siegfried Kracauer termed, extraterritorialism, as the putative modern condition.
Mutations are pivotal to the practices looked at here.
For example, in Peter Alwast's work there is a fascination with a kind of viral arabesque. The resulting silicon-inspired formulations emit a gestural outbreak on what would otherwise be a bedrock of quite minimalist inspiration. On the other hand, Petalia Mackay seeks to paint three-dimensional paintings. Mackay divides her canvases by means of the sparsest minimal gestures. For instance, the horizontal and vertical line divide the surface.