This is the launch of Acrylicize's first exhibition - 16 artists creating brand new works around the theme, 'Everything Has Been Done Before'.
Acrylicize are a collective of Artists, Designers and Craftsmen, disrupting both the traditional art world model and accepted notions of branding. By playing in the space between Art and Design we tell the unique stories of our global clients, creating bespoke artworks that champion our concept of ‘Art as Identity’.
Inspired by the search for purity of an idea, against the backdrop of unlimited information, the individual artists of Acrylicize here interpret the statement, ‘Everything Has Been Done Before’, questioning the notion, ‘does a truly ‘original’ idea exist?’
The means of artistic expression, we are told, are infinite and the topics available for questioning and discussion are limitless, yet often artists discover their “original” idea already exists.
What effect on creativity and authenticity of an artwork does living in the age of social media, where we can see what everyone else is doing all the time? Blurring between the author and the audience through expanding publication, proliferation and dissemination of imagery could reinforce a loss of an artworks ‘aura’ as first asserted by Walter Benjamin his best-known work ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’. Yet this loss of an artworks traditional meaning can liberate and free artworks from their initial intensions, allowing a collective re-appropriation and reconstruction. Furthermore Ludwig Wittgenstein argued that copying and reimagining artworks is important to distinguish “it” art from non-art via the notion of ‘family resemblance’.
Should artists be prevented from realising an idea because it has been done in a similar form elsewhere, and does this make it any less relevant? These questions are integral to our practise, our industry and the creative culture as a whole.