The Indiscipline of Painting

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Tate St Ives 8 October to 3 January

Working with Tate St Ives artistic director Martin Clark and University of Warwick curator Sarah Shalgosky, artist Daniel Sturgis has curated a project 'The Indiscipline of Painting' which draws together 49 painters from Myron Stout to Tauba Auerbach in a reappraisal of the conditions for contemporary abstraction. A day-long St Ives seminar and an excellent catalogue with short pieces on each artist and essays by Sturgis and Terry R Myers have extended the exhibition's impact.

'Indiscipline' is Sturgis's criterion for selecting abstract works that have challenged discipline norms, namely those of US critic Clement Greenberg, whose mid-20th-century writings stipulated that artists address each medium's integrity 'to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence', which in painting's case meant emphasising the flatness of the picture plane. Sturgis also cites geometry and graphic language as key features of the selections, parameters shared by his own studio practice, concerned as it is with …