A Room Hung With Thoughts: British Painting Now: Curated by Tom Morton

The Green Family Art Foundation is pleased to present A Room Hung With Thoughts: British Painting Now, curated by Tom Morton. The exhibition brings together an intergenerational group of forty artists who share a strong connection to Britain, whether through birth, residency, or artistic education.  

The first show of its kind to be held in Dallas, Texas (US) A Room Hung With Thoughts focuses on the  vitality and diversity of contemporary British painting, while foregrounding its practitioners’ ability to speak to both the history of their medium and to a broad spectrum of contemporary concerns. Featuring recent acquisitions by the Green Family Collection, a number of outside loans, and several paintings made especially for the show, A Room Hung With Thoughts represents each participating artist through a single work.

The title of the exhibition echoes an observation attributed to the seminal eighteenth-century British painter and theorist Sir Joshua Reynolds, that “a room hung with pictures is a room hung with  thoughts”. Unpack these words, and what emerges is an insistence that making (and viewing) images  is an activity that engages not only the eye, but also the mind. They remind us that a painting is set of ideas, given visual form.  

Placed into dialogue in the Green Family Art Foundation’s exhibition spaces, the forty works (or “thoughts”) in the show come together to provide visitors with an insight into British painting today—many of its key established and emerging voices, its multiple positions and vectors, and its vibrant, often unruly, and perennially questing energy. Here, figuration meets abstraction, the everyday meets the fantastical, and themes, concepts, and atmospheres play off and enrich each other in a unique cross section of contemporary painting practice. 

 A Room Hung With Thoughts will be accompanied by a color publication, featuring an essay by the exhibition’s curator, Tom Morton.  

About the curator

Tom Morton is a British curator, writer, and regular contributor to frieze magazine, ArtReview, and Art Basel Stories. He has curated over 70 exhibitions, both as a curator at the Hayward Gallery, London (UK) and Cubitt Gallery, London (UK) and as an independent curator. His shows include Roger Hiorns: Depotenziare at C+N Canepaneri Gallery, Milan (IT), 2024; The Kingfisher’s Wing at GRIMM, New York, NY (US), 2022; Ahppärät at The Ballroom, Marfa, TX (US), 2015; British British Polish Polish: Art from Europe’s Edges in the Long ‘90s and Today at CSW Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw (PL), 2013, co-curated with Marek Goździewski; and British Art Show 7: In the Days of the Comet at Hayward Gallery, London (UK) and touring, 2010-11, co-curated with Lisa Le Feuvre.  

 Morton is the author of numerous monographic catalogue essays, on artists including Glenn Brown, Rashid Johnson, Pierre Huyghe, Christian Marclay, Tal R and Tino Sehgal, among many others. He has taught fine art and curating at a number of art schools and universities in the UK and  internationally, and has published several works of short fiction, often in collaboration with contemporary artists. Morton has an MA in History of Art from The Courtauld Institute of Art, London, and is currently based in Rochester, UK.