Workplace is pleased to participate in NADA Miami 2024 with a group presentation of works by Simeon Barclay, James Cabaniuk, Sooim Jeong, Laura Lancaster, Rachel Lancaster, Robin Megannity and Meredith Sellers.

A detail of a work by Simeon Barclay of photographs collaged onto a blue background

Miami

NADA Miami

Workplace is pleased to participate in Minor Attractions 2024 with a group presentation, highlights include Laura Lancaster, Rachel Lancaster, and Pei Wang.

Minor Attractions is a week-long art fair hosted in The Mandrake Hotel inviting global commercial galleries and not-for-profit art spaces taking place from the 8-13th October, 2024. The fair is designed as a space where art and nightlife meet, allowing the swells of international collectors in the city to mingle with the art workers and artists that make the art world tick. Galleries are encouraged to bring exciting and daring work, creating a new context for London’s buzzing art scene.

A detail of a painting by Rachel Lancaster of a person's blonde hair dramatically lit against a dark background

United Kingdom

London

Minor Attractions

, a group exhibition including new works by Eve Ackroyd, Tomas Harker, Xingxin Hu, Sooim Jeong, Joseph Jones, Maria Meyer and Sarah Poots.

 focuses on the often overlooked aspects of daily life — the banal, the mundane, and the seemingly insignificant moments that weave through our everyday existence. The group exhibition explores the quiet, fleeting interactions we experience, such as painting one’s nails or exchanging a glance with a stranger. These ephemeral moments, though brief, are rich with potential implication, suggesting that within the commonplace lies a world of untold stories and a multitude of possibilities. 

Eve Ackroyd’s paintings depict everyday activities of women, situated in domestic settings both real and imagined. Drawing from a wide range of sources including film, literature, and her own personal histories, Ackroyd constructs intimate scenarios that evince both a quiet stillness as well as a palpable tension. Her work often captures moments of solitude, reflection, and quiet interaction, placing her figures in both mundane and dreamlike environments. 

Tomas Harker’s work explores the search for meaning in an era defined by mediated experiences resulting in a fragmented and confusing reality. His paintings reflect the disorientation and complexity of contemporary life, where clear narratives are obscured and truth often feels elusive. Through ambiguity and the colliding together of disparate imagery, Harker’s paintings encourage a deeper, engagement with the world’s complexities.

Xingxin Hu's paintings explore themes of female identity, the paradoxes of self-perception and societal expectation, and the restless nature of human desire. Hu views her works as a collection of self-portraits, shaped by her personal experiences and rooted in the everyday - through the lenses of film, literature, and introspection. Pairing a luminous yet subdued colour palette with tightly cropped, filmic framing, her paintings evoke fleeting intimacies and the tangible tension of private moments.

Joseph Jones produces detailed paintings of cats and flowers that explore sensitive notions of care, compassion and nurture. The singularity of his paintings invite us to break away from frantic image consumption and instead ask us for a slower reading, challenging conventional perceptions, and prompting internal reflection.

Maria Meyer’s small-scale paintings explore the shifting meanings of objects and images as they move through different social contexts. Drawing from overlooked, everyday imagery from snapshots of strangers to second-hand items for sale, she deconstructs and decontextualises these found visuals to create new narratives. Meyer’s work invites viewers to reconsider how we assign value to images and objects, highlighting how small changes in context or composition can completely alter their meaning.

Sooim Jeong’s work draws from a wide spectrum of experiences, from the profound weight of tragic loss to mundane and seemingly trivial interactions with strangers. With a restrained and sensitive colour palette and minimal calligraphic brushstrokes, she constructs playful compositions. Bringing together disparate fragments of scattered past and more recent memories, Jeong recomposes these into images which each hold distinct and singular meanings.

Having learned traditional Korean calligraphy, she reimagines fragments of past and recent memories, transforming them into playful yet emotional compositions. She frequently incorporates familiar objects, like shirts, mittens, and vases, which take on new significance as personal symbols. Her paintings are further enriched with whimsical motifs of foliage, fruit, and smoke, reflecting both her introspection and the influence of her surroundings near Greenwich Park.

Sarah Poots' paintings focus on the intimate and personal, using everyday objects including drapery and candles as both symbols and fragments. These motifs, often cut out or arranged in layered compositions, invite contemplation on memory and touch. Central to her work is the tactile connection to the material world, with hand-tied mementos signalling the act of memorialising the ordinary. By pairing or grouping works, Poots creates a dialogue between them, offering a quiet, introspective space for the viewer to slow down and reflect on the subtle beauty in the everyday.

A painting by Xingxin Hu of a closeup of glossly beige nails

Ordinary Things

RIA has commissioned the first performance work by British artist Simeon Barclay which will be presented in partnership with the ICA, London in January. 

 will see Barclay perform himself for the first time alongside musicians within a work he has conceived to address British identity, particularly in relation to masculinity and class. The commission is part of our Practising Performance programme.

 combines a monologue written and performed by Barclay with live percussion by James Larter and horn by Isaac Shieh specially developed for the performance. With this new performance Barclay questions a mythic idea of Britain through a personal lens. It introduces Barclay’s own history growing up in Huddersfield with parents originally from the Caribbean and reflects on the industrial landscape of northern England in the 1980s and 90s. Collaborating with musicians James Larter and Isaac Shieh, he brings together spoken word, rhythm and melody. The Ruin draws on a wide range of references from early modern music to landscape, urban design and fashion.

Simeon Barclay is known for his sculptural and installation practice which is rooted in material histories. He uses pop cultural references to explore personal and cultural memory and to navigate imposed and self-created identities. Interested in self-image, particularly in relation to socioeconomic status, race and 'Britishness', 

 investigates masculinity in a dynamic live ensemble piece.

A black and white portrait of Simeon Barclay sat on a chair with his legs crossed and holding a mask over half his face

RIA Presents: Simeon Barclay, The Ruin

Workplace is pleased to announce b chehayeb’s first UK solo exhibition tomboy heaven.

The exhibition will feature new paintings by chehayeb, which explore the complexities of memory, identity and cultural hybridity.

chehayeb’s gestural and vibrant semi-abstract paintings attempt to reconstruct fallible memories and sensory experiences of adolescence. Born in Dallas and raised in ‘Frontier’ towns such as Abilene in the West Texan orbit of Fort Worth, chehayeb’s formative years were spent negotiating her resistance to powerful archetypes within Mexican and American culture and religion. Softball, writing, and eventually Art provided routes of escape from a seemingly inevitable conformity to heavily gendered societal norms.

Enveloped in her experience of growing up in West Texas in the early 90’s, the paintings are marked by blocks of vibrant colour - dirt red and loamy ochres mix with deep blues of Texan skies, which gather haphazardly to form vast dreamlike tableaus upon which stories and histories play out.

I paint to understand how I got here, how I learned language, and ultimately study what is permanent, and what is temporary in regards to memory.

Populated by a cast of part formed objects, stars, cowboy hats, trophies, snakes, underwear and cigarettes become protagonists that parade through the unstable territory of memory, a visual lexicon of motifs, pointing towards a fluid selfhood emerging from a place between cultures and language.

A detail of a blue abstract gestural painting by b chehayeb

tomboy heaven

, a solo exhibition including new paintings by British artist Paul Barlow.

Paul Barlow’s paintings are built from an intensely obsessive process of accrual and removal. Beginning with an unprimed stretched canvas positioned flat on the floor, Barlow floods the canvas with highly diluted acrylic paint. Then, hung vertically upon the wall Barlow applies a higher concentrate of acrylic - allowing the pigment to bleed into the water soaked canvas. This process is repeated over and over, often interrupted by a complete rewashing of the canvas.

Binary rhythms of paint and water, of addition and washing away, laying horizontally and hanging vertically, are set up. Minute adjustments and the surface tension of liquids affect the image that appears and recedes from view - the process oscillating indefinitely until a work is accrued.  

The works installed in Workplace | Newcastle are placed with attention given to the space between the works. Three new larger works are tall and thin, and obliquely echo the proportions of a human - subtly registering their physicality as such to the viewer. These are punctured by two smaller square-format works. Together they become an intervention into the architecture of the gallery, the spatial tension evinced within and between each work becomes palpable – operating together as if an orchestral score articulated by silent objects. 

’ evokes the paradoxical and indeterminate nature of Barlow’s practice. Assertive in their presence as both image and objects, there is a sense that they have just materialised - as if out of thin air - and may yet disappear again at any moment. Firmly rooted in the sublime, Barlow’s use of paint seeping into water and his intentional warp and weft between positive application and negative removal relates his work, by association, to ink paintings of East Asian tradition and their philosophical and contemplative underpinnings. Barlow’s work is however more closely aligned to a contemporary understanding of the sublime - that of deep mathematics, of fractal curves, particle physics, and wave forms and noise, ebbing and flowing, rinsing and repeating infinitely.  

Open by appointment. Please email info@workplace.art to arrange a visit.

Newcastle upon Tyne

Thin air

Workplace is pleased to announce the first UK solo exhibition by Pei Wang.

’ is a technique which cinema has long employed to reveal more than the human eye might normally see – a device to build empathy between the viewer and the protagonist in the service of a constructed narrative. In the work of Pei Wang, tightly cropped faces are rendered on canvas with meticulous and unwavering detail. 

Light glistens on the moist surface of an eye, translucent layers of saturated colour forms skin as minute crevices and folds undulating in and out of focus. Brooding dramatic tension is heightened by the murky chiaroscuro of a darkened background.

In his seminal 1936 essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ Walter Benjamin argues that the ‘aura’ - the presence and authenticity of a work of art - is rooted in its singularity and uniqueness within a specific context, whereas mechanically reproduced artforms such as photography and film shift away from the singular aura of the art object towards a democratisation and politicisation. In our age of digital dissemination, Pei Wang’s canvases are a battleground, a site of both homage and challenge, where the aura is not lost but transformed.

Depictions of the face and body align with our innate human reflex and desires that are exploited by digital platforms to feed our perpetual engagement. Wang’s use of casein tempera—an ancient form of paint derived from milk and laden with historical and biological connotations—stands as defiant affirmation of the tactile and the temporal. Surface texture, the play of light and shadow, the subtle gradations of colour—all are given prominence, demanding from the viewer a meditative attention that opposes the scrolling speeds of digital consumption.

The algorithm—a god of our own unwitting creation—demands of images a certain legibility and speed of consumption. Wang’s work resists this with a stoic ferocity. Here, the close-up does not merely serve the algorithm's insatiable hunger for clarity and immediacy. Instead, it becomes a tool of resistance, a method of slowing the eye, of demanding contemplation and, ultimately, of commanding a more profound engagement. This is painting as an act of defiance, a slow rebellion against the tyranny of the instantaneous.

A painting by Pei Wang of a child in white with a short blonde bob sitting on a white horse

The Enneagram Mask

, a new solo exhibition by Swedish artist Jacob Dahlgren. Opening on Thursday 29 August, the exhibition will feature new and reimagined sculpture and installation by Dahlgren.

In our ground floor gallery, Dahlgren will present a new version of his seminal installation 

. Colourful tin cans are stacked end to end and snake impossibly throughout the gallery space. The legacy of Minimalism’s intrinsic relationship between the object, space, and the body is expanded by Dahlgren. The contents of the tin-cans having been consumed by the artist, and their metallic graphic wrapped cylindrical husks remaining as both record and measure. These familiar items are removed of their original function and recontextualised as a colourful abstract linear geometric form, creating a dialogue between pure formal abstraction and a shared social culture. 

 speaks both to high modernism and minimalism as well as to pertinent contemporary issues of food production, consumption, cost of living and the economies of a personal and global nature.

A series of new wall-based sculptural works, considered as paintings by Dahlgren, are on view in the lower ground floor. Formed from mass-produced coat hangers, composed in a horizontal striped pattern, these works continue Dahlgren’s longstanding investigation into geometric and abstract motifs in the everyday environment. Stripped of their original function, the coat hangers transcend their utilitarian origins to become vibrant and dynamic works.

A grouping of maquettes by Dahlgren are positioned on plinths in our viewing room, highlighting the artist’s extensive public art practice which have been commissioned internationally in sculpture parks, public plazas and civic environments.  These maquettes – both realised and unrealised as major works - are sculptures in their own right, representing Dahlgren’s ability to playfully reimagine his additive process as giant rhizomatic forms and environments of monumental scale.

This exhibition highlights Dahlgren’s ability to recontextualise everyday objects, transforming them into works that challenge viewers’ perceptions, revealing beauty in the ordinary. Through grounding the materiality of his works in the quotidian and ubiquitous, Dahlgren upends the rarified exclusivity of ‘Modern Art’ - rediscovering it in everyday scenarios, and infusing the abstract with the political.

A sculpture by Jacob Dahlgren of various types of food cans connected end to end to create an endless loop

When Anxieties Become Form

Workplace is pleased to launch the latest instalment of 

, a series of presentations in which the practice of artists at early stages of their career and new to the gallery programme are introduced through a body of work, curated specifically for each presentation.

For this instalment we introduce the work of Pei Wang (b.1989, China), a Barcelona based artist who recieved his BA in Sculpture from China Academy of Art, Hangzhou, in 2012 and his MA in Oil painting from China Academy of Art, in 2015. The artist received his PhD in Medieval studies RA from University of Barcelona, Barcelona, in 2021.

a cropped image of a painting by Pei Wang that depicts a stomach with naval and a scar

Focus

, an exhibition of new work by James Cabaniuk, Jennifer Carvalho, Robin Megannity, Teresa Murta, Norberto Spina, Pei Wang, Alistair Woods, and Tianyue Zhong.

This exhibition explores realms of temporal dissonance, investigating unconventional attitudes to time through various lenses such as queer temporality, the historical return, the contemporary surreal and the fragmentation of memory and narrative. 

 shares its title with a painting by Robin Megannity. A fragment in time is left hovering and untethered, creating a feeling of tension, peculiarity and disorientation.

 depicts a large and ornate gate. Tightly cropped, the painting is built up of layers of small intentional marks, the closed gate - a threshold to the anxieties of life and beyond, through the Pearly Gates toward heaven or the heavy rusting wrought-iron Gates of Hell.

 large and thickly painted abstract paintings delve into charged memories of encounters. Painted with speed, and in a performative mode, they explore ideas of a queer temporality and how experience, histories and identities can shift and dissolve outside of a conventional linear developmental progression. The abstraction and constant state of change leans into the opacity of queerness, traversing bodily and emotional autonomy.

 mines work from Antiquity to the Renaissance to connect historical narratives to the present. Framing the anthropocene as a shift from earlier modes of telling and inhabiting history, her paintings work to trouble an anthropocentrically linear time, defined by humanity’s tendency to erase, rewrite and misremember entire histories.

 classically layered oil paintings emerge from shadowy dialogues between the tactile and the virtual. Scenes exist outside of time in a hallucinatory reality populated by provisional sculptures, found objects and props that merge the prosaic with the hypothetical. In these domains the border between physical and digital spaces becomes porous and elusive, a super-reality wherein the rationality of our advancing technological progress is ruptured by dystopian hallucinations and fragments of the dark and delirious.

 journeys into the realms of the fantastical, bringing together abstracted elements of form with gesture to imply movement and metamorphosis. Intuitively, the artist fuses together elements from both the artificial and natural worlds, offering viewers a gateway into alternate, sometimes absurd, realities. Murta’s dynamic use of colour and shape creates a sense of continual movement and implies the constant flux of time.

 depicts an extreme close-up of a face. Deeply saturated with colour the eyeball looks left, wide-eyed and reddened. Filled with palpable tension, Wang uses surrealist strategies, referencing Buñuel and Dali’s Un Chien Andalou and through his use of casein tempera - a paint derived from milk, he hints back to an essential strangeness at the core of our experience. Wang’s eyeball is held in stasis at maximum openness, perpetually at a moment about to blink.

 explores social and human existence through subcultures. Drawing imagery from everyday life, including aspects of religious iconography, popular figures and mundane objects, he combines both low and high cultural reference points, giving them equal importance and cultural value. Finding equivalence with the historical and the contemporary, Woods elevates the quotidian to establish a new position and system of value.

 paintings, human presence has been obliterated and reworked with linear marks. Beginning her paintings with an image taken at a place and time different from where she is at the time of making, her muted gestural abstractions connect back to a sense of intimacy, introspection and place. Through her work Zhong is interested in reconnecting with past experiences of feeling restrained within a structure, locked within a frozen moment remembering how to begin to escape.

A detail of a painting by Jennifer Carvalho of two hands grasping onto long tangled lengths of hair against the backdrop of a rocky landscape with two small structures

and still I may

Workplace is pleased to announce an upcoming solo exhibition with contemporary British painter Laura Lancaster.


Opening in May 2024 to coincide with a major exhibition of her work at Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art, Sunderland, the presentation of 

at Workplace will build upon and reflect Lancaster’s idiosyncratic exploration of collective memory, loss and longing. Embodying a poignant sense of transience and reflection, her paintings navigate an ambiguous territory between abstraction and figuration, shifting between the sentimental and melancholic, the uncanny and strange. 

Lancaster’s recent body of work depicts anonymous women set within pastoral landscapes, as part of her ongoing engagement with archival and discarded ephemera she sources from online auction sites, flea markets and junk shops. While rooted in a longer lineage of artists pushing the psychological boundaries of figurative painting, she is interested in subverting the gendered nature of this art history. Divorced from their specific context and time, Lancaster’s subject matter appears like a dreamlike vision taken from a shared consciousness, where figures reveal themselves to the viewer, both haunting and alluring, creating a sense of connection between the lives of the lost and the nameless - and our own. 


In this new body of work, Lancaster delves further into the physicality of her materials, refocusing and transforming how paint and image interact with one another. The works explore the interplay of liminal space, and the physical aspect of the paint becoming an entry way for illusion. The result of which is work that is transcient, with figures that ebb and flow as if through a distant memory or a fleeting dream. 

a cropped painting by Laura Lancaster of 4 children sitting in the grass in the woods

In Dreams

Opening reception: Thursday 11 April, 6 - 8pm

Workplace is delighted to announce Ground, a solo exhibition of new paintings by James Collins.


Made deliberately and slowly, often over several years, James Collins employs additive means to excavate shapes and forms that emerge from within and beneath, as if always there. In his meticulous, densely layered paintings, gradual accretions of oil are built into mounds, furrows, and channels, becoming topographical sites of intense colour.


Deep, pearlescent beetle-black blues withhold and reflect light, whilst seemingly earthen browns - on closer inspection - emit spectral patchworks of luminescence. For Collins, paint is alchemical. In the laboratory of his Darlington studio in Northern England, pigment and medium are mixed and melded to create impossibly chromatic hues that shift constantly with the changing light, and as one moves around them.


Challenging the idea of painting as pictorial space, Collins insists on the paradoxical nature of painting both as surface and as event. As objects, his paintings resist narrative and interpretation, remaining absolute in their immediacy, confronting the viewer with the fact of their materiality. Simultaneously, his paintings require the viewer to succumb to spatial and temporal dislocation - to be transported by, and with, each painting – as if through the unknowable reaches of deep time: through epochs, civilisations, and evolution. Through singular, glacial intent, Collins reveals foundational, archetypal forms, primordial signifiers of the great arc of existence.

An installation image of James Collins solo exhibition in a white walled gallery space including 6 thick impasto paintings in dark wooden frames

Ground

Workplace is delighted to announce Amber, a new exhibition of sculptures by artist Hazel Brill, which runs from 12 April - 25 May.

Rooted in her research around prometheus narratives in gothic fiction and sci-fi, her latest body of work combines an assortment of mechanical and organic materials taking inspiration from how biomimicry and biotechnology in architecture blurs the lines between living and non-living. The title references Brill’s interest in the dual seduction and fear around  transformative technologies, as amber lights can be both a warning and a calming, protective presence. Amber has further significance as the resin holds the non-living in stasis, not allowing organisms to decompose, leading to mythologies around it holding the essence of life. Brill uses microscopic images of ancient plant fragments and fossilised insects found inside amber in the designs of her sculptures as well as incorporating pine resin and amber in the materials.

Congregating in the centre of the gallery, alluding to a surreal laboratory gone awry, the works are created from internal mechanisms, such as simple rotating devices, lightbulbs and speakers, as well as strange prophetic dioramas. Modest in size yet intricate in their construction, they embody a sense of motion and agency, like tiny hybrid creatures that have emerged from other worlds.

Her most recent body of work sits between the grotesque and seductive, creepy and tender – expanding upon theuncanny presence of puppet theatre, clockwork animatronics and other forms of beings that navigate the line between living and dead. Bacteria features in the ‘belly’ of one of the sculptures, further alluding to histories of technology imbuing inanimate objects with life – a pygmalian and Frankenstein-like narrative which increasingly underpins storytelling around science and touches on the role of emotion in scientific research.

The sculptures embody an ominous presence and ambiguous sense of agency, acting both as protagonists and portals.Abstract narratives are weaved across the surface and material, appearing on metal, clay, glass, pine-resin, resin 3-d prints, as well as an imprinted on the wall-based works.

An installation view of Hazel Brill's exhibition featuring 5 glowing resin coloured sculptures on steel plinths

Amber

Workplace is pleased to announce a new solo exhibition by London-based artist Max Boyla.

Across Workplace’s two floors, Boyla stages a new series of paintings and installations which explore the spiritual and cultural resonances of the sun. Set to open on 29 February, a leap day, the title of the exhibition evokes the sun as a beacon of hope and a source of anxiety, just as many religious traditions rely upon heat and light as powerful metaphors, a symbolism which becomes all the more pertinent as contemporary environmental consciousness addresses the climate crisis. 

On the ground floor, Workplace’s prominent street-facing window fills the space with light, yet absent of other sources, thebrightness is dependent on the time of day and weather. As visitors walk through the space, a single light bulb is attached to the entrance doorway, making visitors more aware of their own presence alongside the works, and creates a sensory relationshipbetween the objects and how they are encountered. Celestial and ghost-like, these images call back to Boyla’s long-standinginterest in spiritual notions of existence and mythological entities, yet no tangible figures are depicted. Instead, the abstractpaintings embrace elemental qualities, such as one featuring the bluish-black of the moon and another with prominent white spots against a reddish background, mimicking the afterimage of looking at a bright light, an optical reference which expandsupon the artist’s interest in the relationship between looking and knowing, what can be seen and what evades our senses. 

Similar motifs repeat and shift across the levels, creating a sense of transition as if one was a dark inversion of the other, akin to the rotation of the sun and moon. As visitors make their way downstairs, dim lighting in the basement contrasts the daylight above, while a hanging neon sculpture of a star hangs over the staircase marking the transition between both. The series of paintings continue into the basement and are scored with a cyclical soundtrack appropriated from Danny Boyle’s 2007 sci-fi film Sunshine, where scientists attempt to reignite the sun as it dies. Here, Boyla is playing with notions of perception alongside a carefully considered atmosphere.  

The ways in which the paintings function like an installation within the gallery echoes the process behind their construction. In many of the works, Boyla forgoes a traditional use of brushes on a flat stretched surface, instead folding, wrapping and rolling the material, which is then seeped and stained with different combinations of pigment, water, ink and noxious industrial liquids such as bleach, creating a kind of alchemy that emerges out of a physical, almost sculptural process. Painted on satin, a fabric that is notably
glossy, smooth and lustrous, the shiny surface absorbs paint and reflects light, becoming sensitive to the conditions in which they are encountered, a physical quality to the surface that manifests like an illusion.

Driven by an interest in music and film, the artist’s approach to painting follows a subtle thread of analogue influences. Boyla has referenced the glossy surface of the satin he paints on, like a blank CD or DVD, with his painting process riffing on the idea of ‘burning’ a duplicate on a disc. The artist is interested in the ways repetition and multiplicity are connected with analogue material culture, yet also allude to spiritual notions of infinity and the cosmos.

Detail of an abstract Max Boyla painting on silk with large white spots against a red and pink ground

 Crying like a fire in the sun

, a group exhibition of work by three artists: James Cabaniuk, b chehayeb and Rafael Pérez Evans, who each explore their relationship to place, time, memory, intersectionality, trauma, and escape through processes of introspection and investigation. 

In Maurice Sendak’s classic children’s story 

, the protagonist Max is banished to his bedroom by his parent where, in his confinement, he enters the temporal and spatially dissonant world of his imagination, voyaging ‘in and out of weeks’ to reach a fantastical island of cannibalistic monsters that threaten to devour him. Upon conquering them, he commands them to engage in a tumultuous ‘wild rumpus’ before he returns home for his dinner. Steeped in psychoanalytic theory Sendak’s story is an allegory of the human capacity to confront and navigate trauma and intense emotional responses to the world, and how they may be processed and overcome through world-building, psychological fantasy, and imaginative journeying. The artists in the exhibition each purposefully traverse problematic complexities of the external world and their relationship to it, responding through delving into atemporal, fantastical or visionary worlds.

James Cabaniuk employs abstraction and strategies of queer opacity to construct thickly layered large scale abstract oil paintings. Seeking to liberate personal trauma from shame, and exploring queer identity and history, the authoritative singularity and machismo of 20th Century Abstract Expressionist painting becomes a world wherein Cabaniuk navigates their own complex relationship to the power it embodies - simultaneously fetishising and critiquing it. Materiality and performativity are held in tension by Cabaniuk and materials such as confetti, glitter, and soil serve as tools of celebration, resilience, and connection. Through gestural spontaneity the paintings become energetic sites that embody concepts of fun, camp, sexuality, gender, self-destruction, healing, and community to challenge and embrace boundaries. 

b chehayeb‘s paintings transcribe memories and sensory experiences into gesture, colour and texture. Using oil paint and oil stick on board and canvas, chehayeb records stories, as they exist in her memory, into largely abstracted visual language, punctuated by more direct iconography, where each painting represents a moment, or a feeling from the artist’s life. Employing the perspective of her own history and bi-cultural background – having grown up Mexican American in suburban Texas, she is focused on the reconstruction of failed memories, specifically memories warped by nostalgia, gender and cultural hybridity. chehayeb incorporates stories, cultural references, and traumas into her work, always alternating between representation and abstraction. 

Witnessing the demonstrations of Spanish farmers as a child, Rafael Pérez Evans saw vast quantities of lemons dumped in protest against a market devaluation in the 1990’s that made them more expensive to pick than sell. Drawing upon legacies of 1960s sculpture, Land Art and acts of social protest, the artist looks at agriculture and the post-industrial city as a ‘deranged metabolic system’ and considers how historical processes of illusion continue to be present in consumer culture, where infinitely recurring sequences of class struggle, aspiration and power continue to haunt the present. In the sculptural works exhibited at Workplace, optical illusions are created by propping mirrors open with live root vegetables such as yams. Pérez Evans creates fantastical visions of produce, magically suspended in mid-air, floating as strange, bodily, wheel-like forms. Packing material, transportation trolleys and other shipping debris are left conspicuous in the work, giving visibility to the evidence of human labour present in chains of production, usually cleverly hidden.

crop of b chehayeb's painting 'jncos at the quinceanera' a large red abstract painting 

and in and out of weeks

Workplace is pleased to announce a new solo exhibition by Rachel Lancaster. Continuing her longstanding interest in the intersections of cinema and painting, the artist’s new body of work explores a quiet tension between familiarity and mystery, capturing the uncanny backlit glow of pre-digital media. 

Based on films from the 1980s and 90s, the new series of paintings further draws out the ‘noise’ and visual distortion of analogue footage. Rooted in the artist’s own formative experiences with VHS tapes and other physical media, the resulting works reflect the particular light and colour of a past time, evoking a culturally specific aesthetic sensibility through a painterly quality that is equally haunting, curious and dream-like.

Working with photographic stills from films, alongside her own archive of images, Lancaster uses oil paint to heighten the psychological intensity of the scenes and weave an ambiguous narrative through seemingly insignificant subjects: passing shots, commonplace interiors and close ups of inanimate objects. For instance, in 

 (2023) a faintly rendered makeup, a hair brush and mirror sit atop a table, yet the ghostly lighting disturbs the ordinariness of the scene. 

 (2023) are set within quiet domestic moments, but the pronounced point of view creates an unsettling tension.

Lancaster’s world is constructed through fleeting moments and fragments of memory, always existing on the edge of comprehension. Is that the shadow of a bird in flight? Is a detail of clothing or strand of hair from someone passing by?

 (2023), the closeness to the subject straddles a line between comfort and claustrophobia, as a tight cropped view of a man’s chest shows ample detail of fabric and shirt buttons but crops out his face or other identifying features. Others have little action in the centre, instead placing emphasis on the furthest edge of the canvas, as if the point of view was a panning shot around a room. Textures of paper, silk and fabric define the ambiguous paintings, such as 

 (2023), while elsewhere a dream-like aesthetic of gentle fades and hazy vision appears to be on the verge of sleep.

The paintings are made by applying successive thin glazes of translucent oil paint, allowing many layers of colour and texture to accrue over time. Slipping between definition and abstraction, her surfaces contain an array of optical effects. Often, anticipated details give way to looser, minimal rendering that is revealed as a painterly abstraction upon closer inspection. The artist carefully considers subtle decisions about cropping the source material, and through an open ended, intuitive process, evokes a narrative that is full of mystery and intrigue. A careful attention to multiple scales – life size, close up, zoom, at a distance – establish distinct modes of viewing, placing the viewer in different vantage points, either on the floor, at eye level, looking down upon the subject. The eerie scenes are as if they are within their own temporality, either stuck in the past or in a limbo state. Reflections, colours and action point beyond the canvas, suggestive of what else is happening outside the image, lurking out of sight.

detail crop of Rachel Lancaster's painting 'Lost In Another's Dream' a painting of a duvet shot at night in blue tones

In The Wake

, an exhibition of new paintings by Julia Maiuri, which runs from 17 November – 6 January 2024 at Workplace London.

Weaving together scenes of vampires, imposters and the stars of yesteryear, Maiuri's exhibition shifts between cinematic notions of time and a painterly language of memory. In this new series of paintings, the artist continues her longstanding interest in the history of cinema, stitching disparate films to create works that are at once foreboding, ethereal and lyrical.

Distinct from the sharpness of a cut or the sense of closure of a fade-to-black, a ‘dissolve’ within cinema is a particular technique to mark a transition between scenes. Just as this technique is often utilised by directors to play with time and draw emotional, psychological and conceptual connections between distinct moments, Maiuri has invented her own unique dissolves based upon different films for this new body of work. 

Maiuri is interested in how freezing moments of transition creates a feeling of tension and suspense, complicating progression and the permanence of place. She has collected wide-ranging images from the history of cinema to explore visual motifs, character tropes and narrative themes, often collapsing disparate periods and genres. The exhibition title, 

, evokes paradoxes between the past and present, while underscoring psychologically-tense appreciation of time – either within cinema or painting.

Whether it is the dark seduction of a vampire or the personal crisis of a former-star, a number of classic works of cinema confront notions of transformation and change. These paintings are largely based on a number of films which cross history and genre but have a shared set of concerns. By drawing connections and parallels to films and characters through time periods, a new sense of foreshadowing can be felt across the works, while also suggesting that the attitudes and expectations of audiences have, and will continue, to change.

The works display a notable shift in the artist’s process. Making use of both gallery floors, the exhibition will present a series of small and medium-sized paintings on the ground floor, with brightly-coloured raw canvas pieces on the lower ground. While Maiuri has been working with cinematic visual devices for many years, for these works she began with a saturated underpainting, which creeps through in parts of each canvas where the final painting is desaturated and monochromatic. Each series of works mirror the composition of each other, reflecting back subtle conventions of form and visual culture.

a purple hued painting of an eye overlaying a face by Julia Maiuri

Yesterday & The End

Workplace and Gathering are delighted to present 

, an ambitious solo exhibition of large-scale sculpture, installation, and wall-based work by Simeon Barclay, collaboratively shown across both galleries.

Each gallery will feature paintings from the same wall-based acrylic series, drawing an explicit continuity between the overlapping exhibitions. Set against a striking black background, cropped and edited film stills from Hedi Slimane's Celine Autumn/ Winter 23 fashion campaign depict models projecting an effortless nonchalance behind sunglasses, a sight that both absorbed and repelled the artist due to their layer of impenetrability. To further explore this tension, Barclay has intervened into the surface with vinyl and painted canvas, creating colourful abstract blocks akin to the work of Matisse as a gesture towards deconstruction, fandom and appropriation.

At Workplace, a metal railing skirts around the darkened basement, where a series of neon text works held within semi-transparent bins illuminate the space. Visitors, kept at a slight remove by the barrier, can wander through the haunting atmosphere of the environment. A film installation projects handheld footage into the gallery to fill the space with emergency strobe lights, evoking an elusive sense of danger at night, whilst upstairs a fabricated weightlifting rack is adorned with strange and familiar sculptural elements, invoking the notion of strength as a defence mechanism. Here, Barclay’s references to public architecture, institutions of control and tools for individual optimisation gestures towards the privatisation of urban space, where access to public areas is contingent upon private forces and reduces the agency of passers-by, often made indirectly visible due to the presence of sentinels and physical barriers. The silence of the film along with the ambiguity of the weightlifting rack further underscores this sense of what is stated and unstated, what is seen and unseen.

close up image of a model at a Celine fashion show, the model has dreadlocks and is wearing dark glasses

At Home, Everywhere and Nowhere

Workplace is delighted to announce A Savage Garden, a new exhibition in Newcastle by Sarah Schlesinger, which runs from 23 September - 4 November 2023.

Rooted in the psychology of looking, Schlesinger paints monochromatic landscapes which are often obstructed by hedges, bushes and other objects, prompting the viewer to consider concealed meanings or underlying narratives beyond that which is presented.

The exhibition includes nine new small scale works, and continues the artist's exploration into the act of looking as metaphor for understanding. The title, drawn from the novel The Vampire LeStat (1985) by Anne Rice, a follow up to her critically acclaimed debut, Interview with the Vampire (1976), refers to an influential quote and serves as a description of the paintings presented: ‘It was as dangerous and lawless as the earth had been eons before man had one single coherent thought in his head or wrote codes of conduct on tablets of clay. Beauty was a Savage Garden.”

Subtle details explore and expand Schlesinger’s characteristic motif through the series, and her rigorous muted tones capture the velvety darkness of a night sky, the intricacy of clouds and billowing smoke, the tranquil beauty of wide open spaces. A moody atmosphere permeates the scenes, as the juxtaposition of light and shadow evoke tensions between paradoxical beauty and impending doom. In others, hedgerow weaves under the tranquil night sky, winding across the surface of the canvas to create a sense of movement and rhythm. At times, a hint of danger is present through misty haze, a perplexing smoke without fire. While the presence of lost objects, tools and weapons, hint at a concealed conflict.

a painting in dark green of a snake in the grass by Sarah Schlesinger

A Savage Garden

, a solo exhibition of recent works by British sculptor Eric Bainbridge. The exhibition draws on Bainbridge’s interest in the inherent potential for meaning that is woven into everyday objects and brings together two distinct bodies of work to be exhibited for the first time.   

Brightly coloured vertical forms, arranged precariously through the gallery, are revealed on closer inspection to be combinations of glassware and ceramics collected by Bainbridge from second-hand shops and markets. These high gloss, often translucent, domestic vases, cups, and ornaments are fused together by garish, viscous resin paste in combinations that hover uneasily between the beautiful and the absurd.    

Downstairs, a diverse array of ceramic figurines are rendered ambiguous through the application of pigmented resin and geometric harlequinesque pattern, which obfuscates and generalises their form. Based on the European figurative ceramic tradition, these objects are drawn from nostalgia, and range from those formally close to 18th century Northern European ceramics, to those that are idealised or pastiche; clichéd archetypes: the goose and the maid, the farmer's wife, the lady in waiting, the ballerina, and the dandy posing jauntily in false sophistication.  

Throughout the exhibition, we discern a tension between the works' innate frivolity and their deeper philosophical implications which lie in their original function as household ornaments used to decorate the mantlepiece or sideboard. These objects represent a bygone era and ideals that are rooted in nostalgia for a simpler time. Bainbridge calls into question the validity of such a worldview, alluding to the dark, unrefined aspects of society through upending and destabilising their form and surface and exposing the contradictions and inconsistencies that underlie our societal myths and ideals.   

 encapsulates the oppositional qualities of his work, drawing on the multiple meanings of the word. As a sound, ‘pluck’ is onomatopoeic and aesthetically pleasing, whereas it’s use as a verb - to ‘pluck’ a flower contrasts with its use as a noun: ‘Pluck’ being the residual and forgotten low-grade meats such as gizzard and lungs. This juxtaposition is also a nod to Bainbridge’s grandfather, who used such organs to create Pluck Stew, a dish the artist remembers as ‘disgusting.’

Installation shot of Eric Bainbridge's exhibition PLUCKPLUCK

PLUCKPLUCK

Workplace is delighted to present the first solo exhibition of Philadelphia based artist Olivia Jia at its 40 Margaret Street space. The exhibition will include a series of new small-scale paintings in which the artist brings together an array of images and objects sourced from her own archive onto the pages of fictional manuscripts, creating personal and poetic narratives.


Inspired in part by 19th century American still-life and trompe l’oeil painting, early and pre-Renaissance European paintings of books, and Surrealism; Jia’s meticulously painted, unconventional still-lifes depict manuscripts and archival spaces as containers of personal narratives and history. The images presented on these pages stem from the artist’s extensive and ongoing personal archive of photographs, ephemera, and objects. A photograph of Jia’s great-uncle’s star-spangled tunic is placed next to a clay pot from an internet search, found while pining for a lost heirloom; a bunch of flower market lilies is painted while thinking of 19th century botanical illustration; the moon from the artist’s childhood bedroom window is juxtaposed with a jade comb carved with a crane. 

Detail shot of a painting by Olivia Jia: Untitled (book fragments, two way mirror, portal), 2022 Oil on panel. 

Ex Libris

Workplace is pleased to present England's Lost Camelot, an exhibition of new multi-media and installation works by British artist Simeon Barclay. 

England's Lost Camelot is Barclay’s first solo show with Workplace and will open this September at the gallery's West End location. The exhibition takes as its starting point the legacy of the gallant knight, examining the persistence of its associated iconography in British folklore and its lasting influence in the construction of still prevalent ideas of masculinity. Combining research of this medieval legend with reference to popular culture and his personal biography, Barclay continues to explore the contestation, and strategic negotiation of cultural narratives that influence our behaviour and conformity to archetypes.


The installation elements, which surround the works in the exhibition, feature artefacts and images borrowed from both British folklore and black political resistance, and function as a way of understanding the often complex and ambivalent nature of belonging and
subjectivity. These elements are interspersed with a series of collages constructed from the artist’s own personal archive of ephemera. Essential to the artist’s practice, this process of collecting, manipulating and reconfiguring these sources allows him to unpack their relation to his personal history as well as understanding their wider impact on the present. The artist states that 

“Being a working class, black northern male with roots in Carriacou….yes of course these markers have cultural resonance… I guess what my own archive has allowed me, in a way, is to complicate and curate these points of identification.”


Dealing with the theme of exclusion, the works within the exhibition are populated by barcodes, fences, and other motifs that aim to obstruct the sight and complicate the viewer's relationship to the images. The barcode, a sign that is ubiquitous across all commercial shop bought items, becomes a means of thinking about perception and how the nuance of identity formation can be, for better or worse, flattened to just a symbol. As a play on words ‘bar-code’ is a reflection on the intricacies of negotiating, stigma, authenticity, hierarchies, status and regulation and is a recurring motif within Barclay's work.


This theme of exclusion continues throughout the exhibition informing the placement of works and their relationship to each other. A photo collage diptych of young Simeon Barclay reading a red top newspaper is covered in the latticed cage of a wire fence, in situ,
and obstructing the work’s view are two replica Great Helms emblematic of the helmets worn by knights in battle. They have been battered and then embellished in black powder coated paint and hung at the artist's head height to suggest the confinement of perceptions and the psychological masks needed to navigate the constraints and trauma of exhibiting a unilateral ideal of masculinity. As a code for invulnerability, isolation and defensiveness, the armour and its associated imagery still has a potent appeal. The artist looks at how these are embedded in the national psyche informing contemporary debates on the legacy of imperialism and nationalism and its residue as a history bequeathed to him as his inheritance.

a detail image of 'Chips on My Shoulders' a brightly coloured collage by Simeon Barclay. Comic strips, pop culture imagery and bar codes are overlaid to create a colourful montage.  

England's Lost Camelot

Some recent theories assume that about 3,5 billion years ago our world was a waterworld and that the Earth was fully covered by one huge ocean. Then life appeared: new lands and new stories can only exist where water is, where things constantly change and disappear at the end of each cycle.

We are born into water, floating is what we do first.

We change in time and we adapt ourselves to the spaces we live in, like water changes and takes the shape of whatever keeps it from flowing away.

Pure water is transparent and yet visible. Absorbing, reflecting and refracting light, water catches colours from the world and turns into painting.

It can freeze, it can be solid and turn into sculpture.

Water is mystery after all: we know its properties, we know the structure of its molecules, and yet we can’t really say how deep an ocean can be, how fast a river can run, how long a pelting rain can last.

Water is both a starting and meeting point in Workplace’s exhibition space in Haggerston. Here the works on display subtly interface with the landscape outside, bordering Regent’s Canal. On this waterway, it turns out that art and water have something in common: flowing fast along different streams, they both transform the spaces they inhabit and are able to produce shapes, energy and colours, and create new worlds. Alluding, referencing or using water in their creation process, the works in the exhibition remind us of the pervading presence of this element in our life and our collective imagination.

The exhibition is accompanied by a new poem written by Art Historian and Poet Ilaria Monti which was inspired by the gallery’s location and the works in the show. 

 David Foster Wallace, 2005, Commencement speech to the graduating class at Kenyon College (Ohio, USA).

Algaé Bassens (b.1986 in Mons, Belgium) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She received her BA at The Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, Oxford University and her MFA at The Slade School of Art, UCL in 2011. Recent solo exhibitions include Sincerely at Hesse Flatow, NY; Surface Tension, Nars Foundation, Brooklyn, NY; and YOU CAN SEE BETTER FROM HERE, at CRUSH CURATORIAL, New York, NY. Recent group exhibitions include Fête Galante at Heaven Gallery, Chicago; and STILL HERE, Newington Gallery, London. She was selected for the Jerwood Drawing Prize 2012 and the East London Painting Prize 2013 amongst other events.

Melissa Brown (b.1974) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She received her BFA in Printmaking from the Rhode Island School of Design, and her MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Yale. Recent solo exhibitions include: NYNY2020, Derek Eller Gallery, New York; Between States, Derek Eller Gallery, New York; and Melissa Brown, Tennis Elbow, the Journal Gallery, Brooklyn, NY. Recent group exhibitions include All of Them Witches, Los Angeles; E-Motion Support Group, Art of this World, IGTV; and Fountain, Melissa Brown and Jamie Bull, Lamar Dodd Galleries, University of Georgia. Her work is in the collection of The Whitney Museum of American Art, and the New York City Department of Education.

Joel Kyack (b. 1972 in Pennsylvania, USA) works and lives in Los Angeles. He received his BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1995, studied at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine in 2004, and received his MFA from the University of Southern California in 2008. Recent solo projects include Time Time Time, Francois Ghebaly; I am the present, General Projects; Hold On Tightly / Let Go Lightly at Workplace Gateshead; Point at the Thing That’s Furthest Away at Praz-Delavallade, Paris; The Knife Shop at Kunsthalle - LA in Los Angeles.

Becky Kolsrud (b. 1984) lives and works in Los Angeles, California. She received her BS from NYU in 2006 and her MFA from UCLA in 2012. Recent solo exhibitions include: Elegies, JTT, New York, NY; As Above, So Below, Make Room, Los Angeles, CA; and New Paintings, Tif Sigfrids, Athens, GA. Recent group exhibitions include: Mirror-Gazing, The Pit, Los Angeles, CA; and Nasty Women, Gavlak Gallery, Los Angeles, CA. Kolsrud has been the recipient of the Rema Hort Mann YoYoYo Grant and the Resnick Scholarship. Her work is in the collection of the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA.

Laura Lancaster (b. 1979, Hartlepool, UK) lives in Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK.  She has shown her work in exhibitions worldwide including Night Gallery, Los Angeles; New Art Gallery Walsall; Sargent's Daughters, New York; Wooson Gallery, Korea; Workplace, UK. Group Exhibitions include: Tokyo Station Gallery, Japan; Museum of Art, Kochi, Japan; Itami City Museum of Art, Japan; Prefectural Museum of Art, Japan; Kunstmuseum Bern, Switzerland; Museum of Modern Art St Etienne; Glasgow International; October - Salon, Belgrade, Palazzo Della Arte, Napoli; Accademia d'Ungheria a Roma; BALTIC 39, Newcastle, UK. Lancaster's work is in The British Council Collection; New Art Gallery, Walsall, UK; Nerman Museum, Kansas, USA; The Government Art Collection, amongst others.

Mevlana Lipp (b.1989, Cologne, Germany) lives in Leverkusen and works in Düsseldorf. He graduated from the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 2015. Solo exhibitions include: Fluidum, Andersen’s Contemporary: The Other Space, Copenhagen; Calypso, Public Gallery, London; and Eden, KuK Gallery, Cologne. Select group exhibitions include Poisonous Kiss. Lovely Venom, Tick Tack Gallery, Antwerp; Lost in translation, Plus-One Gallery, Antwerp; Twisted Dream, John Wolf, Los Angeles.

Ryan Orme (b.1986 in Bournemouth, UK) lives and works in London. He received his BA in Fine Art from the University of West England, Bristol and his MFA Sculpture from The Slade, London. Recent solo and group exhibitions include Rise and Fall, Platform Arts, Belfast; Teaser, Royal College Project Space, London; let me know before you arrive, Warbling Collective, London; and Bad Behaviour, Brixton East, London. In 2019 he held the AVA Residency at HKBU, Hong Kong.

James Prapaithong (b.1996, Bangkok, Thailand) currently lives and works in London. He received his BA in painting from Wimbledon College of Arts and is currently studying for his MA in painting at the Royal College of Art. Recent exhibitions include Still @live, MAPA Fine Art London; To My Twenties, Old Central St. Martins Building, London; and The Weird and the Eerie, Hockney Gallery, London.

Will Peck (b.1991, Norwich, UK) lives and works in London, UK. He received his BFA from The Cass, London Metropolitan University, and his MFA from the Sandberg Instituut, Amsterdam. Solo exhibitions include Air Sensor, Lavender Open Chair in Tokyo; Prin print prog, Centre for Recent Drawing in London; and log lights, Mumei, Tokyo. Group exhibitions include the OUTPOST Members show, selected by White Pube, in Norwich; the Ipswich Annual Biennale 2018; and A Caroming, Centre for Recent Drawing, London. He is currently undertaking a residency at Villa Lena Foundation, Italy.

Michael Stamm (b.1983, Evanston, IL) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.  He received his BA from Wesleyan University, his MA in English Literature from Columbia University, and his MFA from New York University. Recent solo exhibitions include “so super sorry sir”, Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles; Mediation Inc., DC Moore Gallery, New York; and Just Like This Please, Thierry Goldberg Gallery, New York. Recent group exhibitions include: Equal Affections, Grimm Gallery, Amsterdam; Contemporary Domesticity, Taymour Granhe, London; and Psycho, Easthampton Shed, Brooklyn, New York. He received the NYFA Fellowship in Painting in 2018. In 2019 he was the Visiting Critic, New York Academy of Art, NY.

*Ilaria Monti (b.1993, Rome) is a contemporary Art Historian and Poet. In her first poetry book “Dalla Terra” (From the Earth, Bertoni Editions, 2019) she focuses on the symbolic language of flowers and plants. In the latest book “Pelle Ombra” (Shadow Skin, Terra d’Ulivi Editions, 2021), she puts poetry in dialogue with visual art to highlight how both languages share signs, gestures and images as means to tell memories. She is currently editor at “Menabò - International Magazine of Literary and Poetic Culture (Terra d’Ulivi Editions), where she writes about contemporary art and artist books. She has written essays on the work of Eder Olguin, Hakim Al-Akel, Tiziana Cera Rosco, Maria Adele Del Vecchio and Jenny Åkerlund, among others artists.

Dominique Fung's painting 'Tea Time, Me Time'. A tea pot against a blue and black background, with drops of liquid coming from the spout into an east asian tea cup. 

This Is Water

Workplace is pleased to present Closer and further away, a solo exhibition of new paintings by British artist Laura Lancaster in which she focuses on the reinterpretation of classical subjects involving the female figure. Mostly executed during national lockdowns, the paintings in the show reflect the artist’s yearning for space and freedom, her reaction to confinement and her re-evaluation of the relationship between individuals and their physical environments.     

The new body of work presented in Closer and further away, continues Lancaster’s exploration of the tension between figuration and abstraction whilst focusing specifically on the portrayal of women. The large brushstrokes and quick manipulation of paint blur the distinctions between the female figures depicted and their context. 

The women in these paintings, which are at once appearing and disappearing amongst their surroundings, are depicted asleep, in front of mirrors and in pastoral settings as to reference classical motifs that have been reproduced in painting and sculpture throughout history. However, the removal of detailed visual information, and a push in the direction of abstraction, occludes the voyeurism conventionally associated with historical, conventional, representation of the female figure to allow for a new perspective.    

Beginning her painting process by drawing from photographs of unknown people in unfamiliar places, Lancaster aims not to copy the photos she finds but rather to encapsulate the feeling that she gets when she looks at them. From each drawing, she makes a painting, and then from that painting, another painting, and so on. The process is one that moves gradually in two directions, away from direct visual replication, and towards an accurate distillation of the feelings derived from the source image. 

Lancaster’s new works attempt to occupy the space between the accurate representation of the figure and the emotional territory of abstraction, being at once Closer and Further Away from either approach.

A crop of a painting by Laura Lancaster - a close crop painterly image of a sleeping woman in red hues.

Closer and Further Away

For the opening exhibition of the new Workplace Gallery in the heart of Gateshead town centre, we are pleased to present the first solo exhibition of Newcastle based artist Laura Lancaster.


At first glance Lancaster's new work sits firmly within a tradition of figurative painting, portraiture and expressionism. With gestured rendering of heavy impasto brush strokes and with figures bleeding into the surrounding scene, often divorced from their identity through a splodge or smudge of paint, her figures maintain a slippery anonymity.

Lancaster's strategy undercuts the historical baggage of such a tradition. Found in unwanted photographs and discarded cine film from second hand markets or junk shops, her subject matter is gleaned from other peoples lost or abandoned memories. Lancaster's work inhabits the fleeting moment of the holiday snap or the passport photo. The intimacy of her small paintings is compounded by the distance of her process, her subject matter and method owing as much to the tactics of minimalism as to tradition.

More recently Lancaster has begun a series of monochromes using only black paint on raw canvas, allowing the naked canvas to read as the highlight, further echoing the black burn of light into photographic paper.

"…[Laura Lancaster] performs acts of rescue that are tender and cruel in equal measure by making paintings from the images they contain. Lancaster knows when she has found an image that has touched her: something touched with an odd banality, or ambiguity, or sorrow. She collects dreams of escape…"



from 'What it Takes to Keep a Young Girl Alive'