Shane Haseman
Sympathy for the Devil

Shane Haseman's work is at base a process of remembering the historical avant-garde, enacted as means of coming to terms with the avant-garde's recuperation and attendant accounts of the end of art, but also as an exploration of the ways in which it continues and might continue to be contemporary. This has precipitated an interest in the parasitical relationship between art and theory through which each serves to distort the other, and, perhaps inevitably, an ambivalence toward painting in a psychoanalytical sense, a sense that Haseman maintains is not personal, but specific to the conditions of painting and its critique.

His work is thus both situated, that is to say tactically responsive to its discursive frameworks, and interdisciplinary, exploiting the space between painting and craft, painting and sculpture, painting and performance, or rather, painting by other means.