UAL: Painting Research Network links artists, academics, and practioners who share a serious engagement with contemporary painting and its possibilities. We explore what it means to research painting as a living culture, one that recognises painting as an expanding field, but still relating to its own specific histories and traditions. 

 

UAL: Painting Research Network is open to all current UAL staff and research students whose research or practice deals with painting or related forms. Our activities create space for open, critical, and public dialogue about what it means to 'research' painting now. We ask how do paintings themselves create new knowledge? By what means does studio practice and scholarly enquiry inform one another, and how does painting meet the challenge of the contemporary moment?
To join send a link to your UAL Elements page to jcp@arts.ac.uk

 

UAL: Painting Research Network is a UAL wide research group based at Camberwell College Arts. It has developed out of a number of painting initiatives at the UAL such as Paint Club (2009 – 2016) and paintingresearch (2015 - 2021) and is closely linked to the Journal of Contemporary Painting which frequently publishes work by UAL staff and research students. 

 

UAL: Painting Research Network aims to support academic staff, both individually and collectively to develop world leading research projects that focus on the subject and practice of painting, and that explore how painting can engage actively with disciplines outside its own field in knowledge exchange and inter-disciplinary research.  

 

UAL: Painting Research Network actively welcome enquiries into practice-based PhD study, where painting in its widest interpretation is central to creative practice. Please visit our research degrees page 

 

UAL: Painting Research Network is a University wide group co-ordinated by researchers at Camberwell College of Arts.

 

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UAL: Painting Research Network members regularly organise symposia, conferences and exhibitions that seek to further research in painting. These include: Painted Garments UAL, The Hub, Camberwell College of Arts, 2026; The Curatorial and Painting UAL Doctoral School, 2025; Material Subversions and Transmediterranean Dialogues MNAHA, Luxembourg, 2025; Shapeshifter: Painting & Performance, UAL Doctoral School, 2024; Arcadia for All? University of Leeds, University of Leicester, 2023/4; The Digital Documentation of Materiality in Painting: The Case of Contemporary Korean and British Abstract Art Sonje Art Centre, Seoul 2022/3; British South-Asian Visual Art Post Cool Britannia Camberwell College of Arts and British Art Network, 2021/2; Paintings and other works by David Troostwyk Camberwell Space, 2019; A Point of Gesture Wimbledon College of Arts, 2015; Michelangelo Pistoletto Wimbledon College of Arts, 2018; Painting As ReModel Camberwell College of Arts, 2018; Painting after Technology Tate Modern, 2018; Tableau Project CSM, 2015; We need to Talk about Painting Chelsea College of Arts, 2015; Simon Hantai The Institute Français, 2014; Painting As Document Tate Britain, 2014; There a Ghost in My House Tate Britain, 2014; Becoming Medium CSM, 2013; and The Processes of Painting Swedenborg Society, 2009. 

 

Alongside writing, discourse and curation, the making and showing of artworks themselves is a vital vector for producing knowledge through painting. UAL: Painting Research Network members' practice, whether abstract, figurative or in the 'expanded field' has been recognised and exhibited at leading art research institutions globally including at: Bauhaus Museum Dessau, Germany; British Museum; British School at Rome; Kiasma, Helsinki, Finland; Nanjing Museum of Contemporary Art, China; National Portrait Gallery; Oriel Mostyn; Philadelphia Museum of Art, USA; Royal Academy of Arts; Studio Voltaire; Tate St Ives; Turner Contemporary; Xi'an Academy of Fine Arts, China. Beyond the walls of art-specific institutions, we embrace the dissemination of painting in community and non-art settings, with network members showing their work at sites as diverse as 10 Downing Street; Bishop of Rochester residence; Brixton Tate Library; DKUK; Horniman Museum; Natural History Museum and The Ragged School Museum.