This is the modern world

It's not a photography collection, but each of the 22 artists whose work hangs in The Painting of Modern Life at the Hayward gallery has been inspired by this, the most pervasive visual medium of the last 100 years.

International artists spanning the past five decades have given reality another dimension through their reinvention of the photograph.

The exhibition falls roughly into two areas: the spectacle of life on the world stage - wars, assasinations, riots and arrests; and the mundane, banal aspects of life - work, leisure time, public spaces.

But somehow, through the painted form, these worlds collide together so that, as Johanna Kandl says "these little stories tell us a lot about the world."

Re-telling the news

Many of the artists, like Vija Celmins, who depicts a cover of Time Magazine featuring the Los Angeles riots (below, left), use news stories and photographs as a departure point.

From major historical events like the Kennedy's assassination in the form of Richter's grieving Jackie Kennedy (below right), to the everyday tragedy, like Eberhard Havekost's depiction of a German Tourist lying dead in red sports car after a car jacking, paintings are often made from press photos.

Richard Hamilton's, The Citizen, meanwhile, is inspired by the Republican prisoners' dirty protest in Northern Ireland, the prisoner appearing christlike in their scatological cell. Warhol's famous Death and Disaster series, of which Race Riot, Orange Car Crash and Big Electric Chair (pictured top) are on show, also retells the news to disturbing effect.

What has inspired many of the artists to paint from photographic images is a distrust of those images and a desire to get beneath this veneer to find some sort of other "truth": the camera also lies.

As Luc Tuymans says, although painting is often perceived as one step further removed from reality than photography, "my painting is born out of a genuine distrust of images".

And then there is the 'mundane': a picnic, girls dressing up, people sitting in a park. These paintings give reality another dimension and, like paintings from other eras, capture modern life and transform it into history.

The Painting of Modern Life Exhibition at the Hayward Gallery on London's South Bank runs from 4 October to 30 December 2007.

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