This exhibition is the swansong of Ruth Waller, the long-standing head of the Painting workshop at the ANU School of Art and Design, who retires at the end of this year. Waller, together with Peter Alwast, Raquell Ormella and Su Yilmaz who have curated this exhibition, bring together artists who have been associated with the painting workshop as students, staff or visitors.

It is a huge, crowded, sprawling exhibition occupying the whole gallery space as well as the foyer area and includes the work of Vanessa Barbay, Lionel Bawden, Riley Beaumont, Emma Beer, Vivienne Binns, Julie Brooke, Leah Bullen, Susan Buret, Tony Curran, Fernando do Campo, Tiffany Cole, Romany Fairall, Kirsten Farrell, Rowan Kane, Karena Keys, Sanne Koelemij, Waratah Lahy, Hayley Lander, Peter Maloney, Cat Mueller, Sally O'Callaghan, Elena Papanikolakis, Jacob Potter, Rachel Siobhan Powell, Dionisia Salas, Helen Shelley, Bryan Spier, Kael Stasce, Chris Twiney, Ruth Waller, Jonathan Webster, Mei Wilkinson and Andrzej Zielinski.

There is certainly no coherence in the exhibition, with the artists brought together through their chance association with a workshop in Canberra, rather than some conceptual or stylistic unity. Some artists have a national and international profile, others a much more localised recognition.

Waller’s assessment of painting in a digital world is that “painting, like vinyl in music, is cool”. It is true that in the biennale art scene, painting sometimes appears as a poor cousin to photomedia with endless video installations, assemblages and displays of manipulated photographs. However, once you leave the esoteric climes of art speak, painting still commands a centrality in the art scene in the popular imagination. What perhaps has changed in the past half-century since Udo Sellbach set up the Canberra School of Art is that, in Australia, the purity of mediums has eroded even further and painting is no longer viewed as simply paint on canvas. This finds strong expression in this exhibition.

Peter Maloney, who studied at the Victorian College of the Arts, as well as the Canberra School of Art, has boldly privileged content over means and has employed painting within a varied toolbox of approaches to art making. His Diptych, 2008, juxtaposes a large homoerotic photo-screenprint with an acrylic painting. Meaning resides in the gap between the two. Vivienne Binns’ Big drawing no.2, 2011 (1997 reworked 2011) is a challenging and brilliant piece that stops you in your tracks. It is not only clever in its construction with the layering of imagery and the play with perspectival planes, but also arresting in its visual impact.

Waratah Lahy, another quite well-known artist, plays with the somewhat ghostly impression made on painted lantern slides, which are shown illuminated and echoing different sorts of realities.

Kael Stasce is a more recent graduate from the painting workshop and I have generally associated his work with larger sculptural pieces, which appear to have an industrial edge. In this exhibition, there are a number of small and quite exquisite, refined pieces, including Beneath, 2018, where, in a manner reminiscent of the Russian Constructivists, he plays with perceptions of two- and three-dimensional space by employing a transparency of means and simple, common materials.

Another relatively recent graduate is Dionisia Salas who moves between printmaking, painting and working with glass. The body of work on display in this exhibition consists of quite large relief prints with oil pastel and collage printed on marbled paper. Possibly inspired by someone like Frank Stella, Salas, in a piece like Antimony Dust, 2017, creates a complex web of surfaces and associations in which the eye embarks on an endless journey and the intellect becomes absorbed in the rich theatricality of the event.

This exhibition does not include many of the shining lights associated with painting at this school of art (and its numerous name changes) over the past 51 years, but what is included comments on a vibrant visual culture that more than holds its own in a digital world.