Since the late ’70s, Art & Language has addressed the issue of cultural legibility by producing pictures intentionally susceptible to radical misreading. This project continues and develops with their current exhibition entitled “Hostage Paintings: The Dark Series.” A complimentary group—“The Light Series”—is being presented concurrently at the ICA as part of a survey that extends from 1987 to the present.

Art & Language’s work of the last decade took form through a conglomeration of oddly devised modes and mechanisms of representation. A short list of those strategies includes: camouflage (in

Stanley Spencer first considered the idea of a larger devotional schema within which to organize his individual works at the end of the ’20s. This Church House was to be, as its name suggests, a place for both living and worship, in which the joys of religious belief and of domestic and physical (particularly sexual) experience are celebrated together. The central nave of the Church House was seen as corresponding to Cookham High Street, the main artery through the village where Spencer was brought up, and the memory of which provided him with so much of his imagery. To either side of the nave