Join us 24 January for: ‘Under Pressure: History Painting at the threshold of national cultures'.

Join us on the 24 January at 4pm in School 2 of St Salvator's Quad for ‘Under Pressure: History Painting at the threshold of national cultures'.

You are also welcome to join a wine reception afterwards at the School of Art History, 79 North Street.

Polish artist Stanislaw Chlebowski's career was forged in multiple worlds, in multiple studios and across multiple national narratives. Chlebowski created history paintings for the Ottoman, Polish and French clients, constantly reframing the historic narratives for these diverse patrons. The challenges of code-shifting across this nationally bound genre of artistic practice is most apparent in his longstanding, ultimately irresolvable, effort to create a painting of the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople. This lecture explores that painting's instabilities and its relationship to his Orientalist interiors. These interiors were not static repositories of collecting or studio practice, but spaces teeming with the tension of movement. Chlebowski's unfinished painting began to shape his interiors and its irresolution is redolent of his fraught relationship with his own mobility. This lecture charts the tensions of peripatetic artistic practice, with its multiple- sometimes conflicting- national and imperial narratives. These tensions yield provocations for a more globally expansive history of art.

Mary Roberts is Professor of Art History at the University of Sydney. Working at the intersection of modernism and orientalism, she pursues global networks that inform European and Islamic art. Her books include: ‘Istanbul Exchanges. Ottomans, Orientalists and Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture' (UC Press, 2015), awarded AAANZ's Best Book Prize, ‘Intimate Outsiders: The Harem in Ottoman and Orientalist Art and Travel Literature' (Duke, 2007). Her next book is ‘Four Thresholds. Orientalist Interiors, Islamic Art, the Aesthetics of Global Modernities'.