Afterimage

The Artist Room presents Afterimage, a group exhibition dissecting how a new generation of artists are questioning notions of ‘landscape’ and its possibilities. The exhibition is concurrent with Cityscapes, a solo presentation of works by the late postwar artist Dennis Creffield (1931–2018) in the upstairs gallery. 

Including a group of artists with diverse interests, the works on view share an interest in responding to, or depicting, the outside world. Echoing Creffield’s works on view in the upstairs gallery, the included paintings, sculptures and photographs pay particular attention to power of darkness and its intrinsic capacity to convey qualities like introspection and mystery. While some paintings hark back to a pre-modern age, recalling unblemished landscapes, others convey fleeting moments of sanctuary and stillness today, while others imagine unfamiliar, abstract landscapes. 

“Abstraction is the base mode of any painting I make… I like how loose and flowing elements are kind of corralled in these more heavy, abstract structures,” Ted Gahl once observed. His recent monumental painting Protect Me/Essex Lawn (2023) depicts a group of figures moving through an unfamiliar and dreamlike pastoral landscape. Comparing his work to that of pre-modern painters like Edouard Vuillard and Edvard Munch in the Brooklyn Rail, Andrew Paul Woolbright observed that “Gahl’s paintings are a Connecticut Jugendstil, with all of its fall leaves and winding creek beds, captured in a way that makes you feel foreign to yourself, longing for something you didn’t previously know you had lost, and now, dispossessed of your own experiences, able to see them externalised in front of you”.

Katerina Lukina’s sculptural wall reliefs mark an attempt to, in her words, “search for a superior vision: ​​the ability to see the invisible”. Intricately produced in layers of laser cut plywood overlaid with UV prints, her works resemble miniature stage sets with connecting figures and objects that might form a frame from a story. Her two works, Secretion Is Like Mucus and Their Toes (both 2023), consider potent narrative and mythological associations: the ability of complex systems to arrive from simple forms; ceremonies or practices carried out to mark the lives of those that have passed; and the idea of resurrection, symbolising the ever going cycles of life.

Jake Walker’s abstract paintings are informed by sound, their intuitive compositions distilling the cadence and rhythm of music. Repeating shapes function like ligatures, often appearing across a series of his paintings. Walker has previously observed an intention for his painting practice to reflect the transcendent – perhaps utopian – experience of being engrossed by dance music. Although not starting from any particular representational intention, Accidental Run’s (2023) kaleidoscopic green and violet hues allude to the natural world: perhaps a water lily pond or the ordered patches of a lavender field. 

Informed by the ecology of real world environments, Jen O’Farrell’s works utilise found and reclaimed materials such as ink, dye, pigment, resin, salt and plexiglass. Drawn to sites ranging from stratovolcanic archipelagos in Japan, the Atacama Desert in Chile, and even the streets of London, Hatty Nestor has noted how “O’Farrell – like [art-writer] Lucy Lippard – interweaves locality with wider global climate issues through materiality and gesture”. The materials of her resulting ‘paintings’ like Time Is Moving Slowly, Like Oil On Water and Matrix (both 2021) and Convergence Zone (2023) often react together to create surfaces with a rich physical texture, characterised by earthy, rusty and iridescent tones that appear as their own micro-landscape.

“When you have one foot in something rational, and the other in a sphere that is less easily defined,” says Anna Higgins. “Something sometimes emerges without warning”. Higgins works with photographic processes in addition to hand-applied materials like watercolour, fabric dye and ink. Paring images back, layering exposures together, and working with a reduced – yet often bright, highly contrasting palette – her works render familiar subjects like leaves in trees, clouds, floral arrangements, streaks of sparkling light flares; and in the case of Aegean (Afterimage) (2024) – two exposures: glistening ripples of the sea and the sun behind clouds. Responding to her work, Judy Annear said: “Images are unmoored, become indeterminate. There is a reverie, atmospheres, invention, adaptation and no need to narrate. Expression does not necessarily require a story or clarity”. 

Utilising aesthetics that could be likened to Film-Noir, the stylised method of filmmaking characterised by drama, stark lighting, existentialist thinking, and fatalism, Schuangyi Li’s paintings use “figuration and pictorial fictioning to address deeply felt personal issues of family and familial tension and strife within the context of Chinese social culture”. Emotionally intelligent, her recent paintings like Ebbing Ripples, On My Way and Untitled (all 2024) reflect on “shared psychological pressures within one-child family dynamics are addressed in a coded symbolism that scrutinises the effects of divorce, separation and alienation on the self and loved ones”.