The Painting of Modern Life

Curated by Hayward director Ralph Rugoff, the exhibition explores one of the most influential developments in the history of contemporary painting: the use and translation of photographic imagery.

The first major museum survey of its kind, The Painting of Modern Life charts the evolution of this 'post-painting' movement over the past 45 years, beginning with seminal photo-inspired works from the early 1960s by painters such as Gerhard Richter, Vija Celmins and Robert Bechtle and more recently Ebehard Havekost, Elizabeth Peyton and Wilhelm Sasnal.

Spanning five decades, The Painting of Modern Life reveals the surprising stylistic diversity of the works as well as the great variety of subject matter - from the personal to the political - addressed by the artists.

Exploring the question of translation, the exhibition investigates how the significance and content of an image changes dramatically when it is translated into a different medium, the exhibition identifies the process of translation as central to the art of our time.