Painting Now: Five Contemporary Artists, Tate Britain - exhibition review
Painting is having something of a purple patch. You may not have noticed this unless you visit off-the-beaten-track galleries, however, because it’s been a while since any of our big public galleries has had a notable painting survey.
Even so, Tate Britain’s new show is not one of those vast, sprawling affairs where dozens of painters jostle for space and it doesn’t attempt to reflect the breadth of work out there. It’s a concise, and in some ways modest, view of five very different British-based artists.
They explore rich seams of tradition, providing fresh twists on still life, interiors, landscapes and abstraction. Lucy McKenzie learnt trompe l’oeil painting in a decorative arts college in Belgium and does painstaking paintings of marble surfaces or of cork boards such as Quodlibet XXII (Nazism), where she creates the illusion of ideologically loaded items pinned to boards: a book on Nazi design, a photo of photographer Lee Miller in Hitler’s bath.
For McKenzie, painting is a conceptual tool and, indeed, this is a very cerebral show. The small but brilliant paintings of Tomma Abts are the result of a slow rumination, in which the canvas is the stage for an intensely controlled form of painterly improvisation, a play of pattern and line, curve and zig-zag. For such diminutive paintings they’re remarkably enveloping.
Both Gillian Carnegie and Catherine Story make quiet, muted and enigmatic paintings; Carnegie’s feature strange views of staircases with black cats, or a subdued cityscape, while Story paints objects that look like sculptures or ceramics, hinting at animals or buildings.
Simon Ling’s wonky studio paintings and paintings made on the Shoreditch streets are a delight. United by a ground of acidic orange, they reflect a painter immersed in his medium exploring the world around and within him. He and Abts in particular show that painting can do something no other media can do — and that’s why it remains a vital activity.
Until February 9 (020 7887 8888, tate.org.uk)
