LONDON, ENGLAND.- Hauser & Wirth Colnaghi presents Old School, on view, May 11 - June 9, 2007. Louis-Léopold Boilly, Michaël Borremans, Paul Bril, Glenn Brown, Jan Brueghel the Elder, Jan Brueghel the Younger, Steven Claydon, Lucas Cranach the Elder, John Currin, Berlinde De Bruyckere, Carlo Dolci, Battista Dossi, Marguerite Gérard, Hilary Harkness, Julie Heffernan, Karen Kilimnik, Master of Female Half-Lengths, Christopher Orr, Djordje Ozbolt, Elizabeth Peyton, Michael Raedecker, Wilhelm Sasnal, Anj Smith, Jacob Van Swanenburgh, Luc Tuymans, Adriaen van Utrecht, Jeff Wall, Richard Wathen and Jakub Julian Ziolkowski.

Old School celebrates a re-engagement with Old Master modes of representation, which might be said to be a recent phenomenon in contemporary art. Beyond ironic appropriation, a new school of artists look to the past and revel in the sophisticated pleasures of anachronism, swerving between period styles and details with gay abandon.

In old master and new master works alike, theatricality and storytelling are indulged to the full. Allegories can be read and opinions pronounced through chance details and exaggerated and idealized forms. Bathos, humour and role-playing abound in works such as Jakub Julian Ziolkowski’s Battle Under the Table and Julie Heffernan’s Self Portrait as a Tender Mercenary, whilst it is the dowdily-dressed people that inhabit Orr’s Brueghel-like landscapes that give his paintings their strangeness. Like Orr, Borremans, Peyton, Kilimnik, and Raedecker all weave grim and fabulous fairy-tales out of the conjoining of modern-day realities and old-fashioned charm.