At Guts Gallery’s latest show ‘Beyond Boundaries’ (16 February – 12th March 2024), energy is palpable both on and off the canvas. The gallery space, tucked down an alleyway in Hackney, is packed wall to wall with people, spilling out into the street. Music is pumping through the two-roomed space.
The exhibition does not attempt to mark some paradigmatic threshold in contemporary abstract painting. Instead, ‘Beyond Boundaries’ celebrates the diversity of approaches, the disparate worldviews of a new generation of UK-based abstract artists. The sheer variety on show here reflects the ethos of Guts Gallery: ‘championing’ artists rather than representing them, allowing them to speak for themselves through the lens of their own experience. Many young galleries wish to establish the narrative of the moment– to neatly pinpoint the zeitgeist. This can give their exhibitions a kind of overwrought cautiousness, where the works themselves are in-service to the gallerist’s ambition. Guts Gallery, however, relinquishes all control to the artists themselves – a gutsy move, but certainly a welcome one.
At the opening of ‘Beyond Boundaries’, the mutable soul of each artist shines through with perfect clarity in the crowded room. The overwhelming sense of movement within every work denies any effort to fix human consciousness to one sticking-point. The paintings hang in the balance, in flux, depicting the passage between one ephemeral state of selfhood and the next.
In Ella McVeigh’s ‘Syncopate’ (2024), the play of tension between sweeping, ribbon-like paths of the brush and precise geometric scaffolding demonstrates the artist’s masterful decision-making. The painting is borne from the experience of looking – really looking – at real-world objects, illuminating the pressure-points within.
Lauren Brown’s ‘Digesting’ (2024) is a discomfiting image. Tension is held within its uncanny ambiguity. Paint flows and pulses in blood red and bubble-gum pink against a black, cavernous space. Is this the camera’s view during a laparoscopic surgery, or a hellish portal to another world?
Lola Strong-Brett’s ‘On Lost Shores, Swaying To And Fro, I Sink Here Smiling, Up At That Big Big Blue’ (2024) makes an impression as the only painting with recognisably non-abstract elements. It is a playful spoof of a baroque masterpiece, or a peasant scene by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, where from the diagonal mass of scrawly forms emerge the familiar faces of Pop-Eye and Max Fleischer’s Bimbo, seemingly locked in some Biblical battle. Strong-Brett scrambles high-and-low art, conflict and play, issuing a challenge to both art-historical and socio-economic hierarchies.
If the works in ‘Beyond Boundaries’ have a subject as such, it is the physical process of painting itself. These artists are mad scientists in the lab, initiating experiments with materials which then become source and subject of the artworks.
The fabric surface of the canvas bubbles and blisters, the edges fraying under the chemical colours of H. E. Morris’ ‘Between the Trees’ (2024). The surface of Alba Botines’ ‘Diatoms’ (2024) feels silky and alien, highlighting the organic and technological properties of metallic oil paints layered against each other.
In ‘Action Black 46’ (2024), artist Jerome. breathes life into two black masses. The paint is applied to vinyl flooring, and then, once dry, scraped off and pasted to the canvas. The paint lives a life beyond the canvas, interacting with viewer, artist and participant in a process which can only be described as ‘activation.’
Pulling the show further into the realm of the experiential, several works evoke the feeling of being within an environment: The tertiary colours and dappled brushwork of Annice Fell’s ‘Weathered’ (2024) leads the viewer on a journey through a wild, brackish landscape, whilst the urban glyphs of Joseph Mobolaji Aina’s ‘Cashflow Quadrant’ (2022) conjure the essence of London’s city sprawl. Caroline Jackson’s ‘Litterfall’ (2024) seems to synthesise the chaos of both natural and built environments in electric colour.
One standout is Emma Stone-Johnson’s ‘The light doesn’t touch just one area of the field’ (2024). Like a colour chromatography experiment, an Impressionist masterpiece bathed in acid, or bacteria growing in a petri-dish, luminous colours bleed and blend across the saturated canvas. Her work asks the question, she states, ‘what would it be like to walk through a museum of melted paintings?’
Another favourite is Georgina Stone’s ‘Because you speak to me in words, and I look at you with feelings’ (2024). This as an anguished cry of a painting. Oil and powder paint is forcefully applied, in screaming neon and pink glitter. The work seems the victim of attack – the upper portion of white paint is scarred with claw marks, and the edges bear the stamp of a boot-print.
With this exhibition, Guts Gallery has succeeded in capturing the vitality of a new generation of abstract artist about to pour forth into a calcified art world. If abstraction is the art of energy transfer, then ‘Beyond Boundaries’ is a nuclear bomb.
BEYOND BOUNDARIES, 16th February – 12th March 2024, Guts Gallery
