Several of these paintings were created in 1985 in London – a city almost unrecognisable from what it has become. The year in which the first ever mobile phone call was made in the UK, when Microsoft issued Windows One, the divisive Miners’ strike was drawing to its conclusion, and when Canary Wharf was a desolate area, bereft of life, redundant following the recent departure of the working docks. The disused warehouses that lined the banks of the Thames from St Katherine’s Dock to Wapping were occupied by artists, the first regenerationists, inhabited as inexpensive studios that lacked any amenities but offered large floor areas and spaces where they could be left to create art, alone but working within a collective climate of creativity.
Against this monochrome backdrop, Tricia Gillman was painting these large, uncompromising canvases that were joyous and thrilling, celebratory in their vibrant colour and expanse. Deeply informed by art history – to 20th century French and American painting and to the pictorial structure of early Renaissance painting – these paintings were painted shortly after the artist had seen Matisse’s revolutionary painting The Red Studio 1911, then on temporary loan to the Tate. Gillman’s large canvases share the formal device of a single flat plane on which objects, both natural and man-made, are portrayed in dynamic relationships. The materiality of the paint itself, the variety of her mark making, an active ingredient in the construction of the painting. There are overt references to the traditions of still life, to garden paintings, and to the urban wasteland around her studio. For Gillman, the language is of Abstraction. ‘Abstraction, for me, provides a terrain where I can reference the multi-layered nature of experience.’
Returning to these paintings forty years after their making, bringing them out of the studio and into the public eye, is not an exercise in nostalgia, but a reminder that painting’s narrative arc is non-linear. Painting’s dialogue is not solely with the past, but forward looking, relevant to the art of today. Gillman’s work of the period speaks contemporaneously to the abstract paintings being shown today in Mayfair’s leading commercial art galleries, their due accomplishments deserving reassessment.
‘Few painters of her generation in this country have produced work that gives such immediate pleasure as Tricia Gillman’s.’ Mel Gooding
| Duration | 17 December 2024 - 13 December 2025 |
| Times | by appointment with the curator Nigel Frank nigel.frank@cliffordchance.com |
| Cost | Free |
| Venue | Clifford Chance |
| Address | Canary Wharf, 10 Upper Bank St, London, E14 5JJ, , |
| Contact | 44 (0) 7768 398428 / benjamin@benjaminrhodes.co.uk / www.benjaminrhodes.co.uk/ |