Imagine a world that has not experienced the ravages of covid, remember that moment just before we all grappled with new realities, Twenty-nineteen takes a look back to the year just before we all took stock of life, to the moment of collective innocence of a future not yet begun. Campbell Works presents a time-travel group show where all the works are from a single year – 2019, an awkward interval in that the works are neither freshly made nor old enough to have the privilege of historical context.

Curated by Neil Zakiewicz, Twenty-nineteen will present paintings, prints and sculpture by 18 artists who’s age ranges from their mid twenties to late seventies. For some, this presents an opportunity to reappraise points of reference they departed from, for others the work may be a familiar part of an ongoing body of work.

The exhibition presents us with an opportunity to examine a snapshot of work produced in 2019, a year on the cusp of two impactful events in our collective memory – Covid and Brexit. It will allow us the opportunity to consider an exhibition that might hypothetically have taken place in 2019.

Twenty-nineteen takes inspiration from the exhibition Picasso 1932 – Love Fame Tragedy at Tate Modern which included Picasso’s work from a single year.

Another significant exhibition that re-evaluated art history – was Sturtevant’s The Store of Claes Oldenburg, a restaging created from memory in 1967 of Claes Oldenburg’s The Store, which had been presented six years earlier in 1961 in New York. Claes Oldenburg’s original work inadvertently created a snapshot of life on Lower East Side, Manhattan, with Sturtevant’s reworking reflecting changes over a short historical moment of time.

These three exhibitions can be viewed not only through the discourse at the time the works were created but also through the lens of history. They can be read with a contemporary eye drawing meanings from the intangible essence that is present within work created at any one specific moment in time.