The way it usually goes with painters is that they’ll start off with the real stuff – still lifes, portraits, landscapes, etc – and then get progressively more abstract as they evolve and grow and experiment.
Not Mary Ramsden though, she’s gone the opposite way. The young English painter’s 2017 show at this gallery was all super bright abstraction covered in swirling love hearts. But this, this is something else. This is figuration.
The works in this new show are all interiors: kitchen tables, dining chairs, sofas, stacks of paper, lamps. She’s chucked out most of the abstraction and gone fully domestic.
And it’s proof of what a good painter she is that despite this lurch away from what’s traditionally seen as the more experimental side of her medium, everything here is still weird, still experimental, still unsettling.
Every one of Ramsden’s interiors is pixelated, made of flat, clashing planes of colour. A table is a block of toothpaste green, floors are dappled splodges of pink or blue. The ultra-marine and fleshy pink triptych is gorgeous, the neon yellow and pea green diptych too. And in the smaller works, it’s like all the figurative ideas have been condensed into tiny explosions of domesticity.
It all looks like what an AI would come up with when asked to imagine a living room, stuck in a slightly uncanny valley of recognisability. It exists just on the cusp of abstraction, like Ramsden has captured it just as it was all about to dissolve into nothingness.
There are big nods to art history here, especially French colour block master Nicolas de Stael, but it still feels unique to Ramsden. These are intense portraits of domesticity that barely come together, and they’ve beautiful.
