After a decade of conceptual and minimal art, the 1981 exhibition A New Spirit in Painting at London’s Royal Academy of Arts, took the art world by storm. Lavishly painted, epically scaled canvases reasserted the centrality of painting – and the hand of the artist.
The Return of the Spirit in Painting presents works by artists in the original shows, including Georg Baselitz, Bruce McLean and Julian Schnabel, as well as significant archive material from the Whitechapel Gallery and the Royal Academy of Arts.
