Scarborough Realists Now

In 2008 four artists and an art critic gathered together in the northern English seaside town of Scarborough to stage an exhibition that would challenge the dominant mainstream British art world. Entitled ‘scarborough realists now’ (note the lower case) the exhibition was a deliberate attack on the mainstream metropolitan art world, dominated at the time by neo-conceptual artists and critics who were actively hostile to painting. Against this they succeeded in staging a seminal exhibition of radical contemporary realist painting. As the critic Michael Paraskos argues in a new essay, written to accompany this reissue of the original catalogue, the Scarborough exhibition was intended to celebrate realist painting: but the artists were also looking beyond the realist agenda, foreseeing a time when realist painting itself, and particularly Photorealist painting, would also seem dull, mainstream and in need of revitalisation. Drawing on anarchist art theory, Paraskos explains that whilst each of the artists was producing realist art at the time of the show as a necessary act of resistance against conceptualism, realism and Photorealism were never seen as the ultimate goal. Already these artists were developing individual agendas for their work that would take them beyond realism.