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Nicola Tyson, 'Running Figure' Photo ©Nicola Tyson, courtesy of Sadie Coles HQ, London ‘For this gallery, I’ve invited artists who conjure up fantasy worlds or fictional spaces, with a strong sense of the abstract. The languages of abstract painting can take many forms, and I think these works stretch the definition in many directions.
On the painterly side of the fence are the cartoonish yet threatening figures of George Condo’s painting, the disintegration of Rosson Crow’s terrible feast, the loosely painted planes of Nicola Tyson’s peculiar running woman (right), Ansel Krut’s lively triangular fans, Martin Maloney’s rhythmic triple portrait and Cecily Brown’s energetic and mysterious brushwork.
Frank Nitsche’s elegant geometry in muted tones hints at Disney. Hiroe Saeki’s tiny pencil marks seem to describe the flora and fauna of a distant planet (left), echoing Melissa Gamwell’s ceramic sculpture. Anselm Reyle’s crumpled metallic purple encased in sci-fi perspex is an insouciant way to make an abstract painting.
Hiroe Saeki, 'Untitled' Photo ©Hiroe Saeki, courtesy of Taka Ishii Gallery Dan Perfect and Nigel Cooke combine the look of hallucinogenic lights and flares with more traditional forms of painting. Perfect’s amalgam of abstraction, figuration and landscape remains ambiguous, while Cooke’s tramp is realistically rendered, yet exists in an improbably abstract world. Glenn Brown’s inverted figure is slightly sinister, the tiny brushmarks making a swirling surface of abstracted intrigue.
Rina Banerjee and I include different sorts of imagery. In my painting, multi-coloured brushmarks dissolve around what might be black calligraphic dragons, while pink hearts counterbalance with a sprinkling of Pop. Banerjee’s sculpture twists vintage Sixties brocade, twigs and gold wire through a spiky steel armature to delicately poetic effect. Finally, the gloss of Gary Webb’s hi-fi
sculpture contrasts with Phillip King’s lo-fi and quirky works,
which resonate formally with the paintings in the room.’
- Fiona Rae RA
