It goes without saying that painting is a time-based medium.  Not simply in the studio-based actions which constitute its making, and the material record of these actions (which become its surface).  Nor is it in the sense that the paint-matter that embodies the trace of these actions is itself incrementally in flux, tending slowly toward the same dust that all matter eventually becomes.  But painting is time-based because of the relationship it insists upon with the person looking at it.  While it is (often) perfectly possible to take-in the full expanse of a painting in one glance, only when looking at the poorest painting is that ever sufficient.  No, painting’s essential mechanics (composition, colour relations, dynamic forms, line and field, fast and slow marks, figure and ground, etc) mean that the looker’s eye wanders in and out, around and across a painted surface repeatedly, continually nuancing the way that painting is understood.
 
This movement-in-time, so integral to painting, is sought by Kossoff and Hallum from the very start in the dynamism of their chosen subjects as if to re-state painting’s inability to be remain static.  Through their processes as well as in their resultant works, everything is in constant change.

Between 1979 and 1984 Leon Kossoff worked and re-worked a single copper plate etching of Kilburn Underground Station.  Working closely with printmaker Ann Dowker Outside Kilburn Underground was proofed in 14 stages, each time the plate was (in parts) burnished smooth and re-inscribed.  The artist witnessed the rush of a crowd entering and exiting this busy station on a particular day when he chose to install his easel across the Kilburn High Road. Through the next 5 years this motion became slowed – not to a standstill – but to a pace so protracted that the weight and form of each figure is minutely altered, and the image affected, with each iteration of the drawing-etching-inking-wiping-pulling of the print.
 
Jacqui Hallum’s paintings begin with stains of coloured ink being applied across multiple loose sheets of paper and fabric.  These elements then move repeatedly between the studio at the front of her flat and the garden at the rear.  In these places they are seen differently, receive marks differently, and are subject to different contingent factors (such as weather, or interaction with other works-in-progress).  Images, chosen because of their own potency as well as their being untethered to our present time (medieval woodcuts, leaded glass windows, Art Nouveau children’s book illustrations, Tarot cards and Berber carpets) are partially transcribed onto the stained surfaces throughout the process of their making.  In the gallery these multiple-part paintings are pinned and hitched up into a provisional state, in relation to the light and architectural conditions of that room.
 
This exhibition includes 4 published states of Outside Kilburn Underground by Leon Kossoff: 1st state (1979); 5th state (1980); 6th state (1981) and 11th state (1983), all kindly loaned by Arts Council Collection.  Leon Kossoff (b. 1926) is a painter of London.  In fact it is fairer to say he is a painter of specific places in London: Dalston Junction; Christchurch Spitalfields; Arnold Circus; Willesden Junction; Kilburn Underground Station.  Returning again and again to these same motifs, drawing energy- and light-filled records of the experience of being there, and making slow paintings from this gathered evidence, Kossoff’s works are held in all of the world’s major public museums. Kilburn Underground station is 600m from Kingsgate Project Space.
 
Jacqui Hallum lives and works in Totnes, Devon.  Her paintings have long embraced slow change.  For many years she cultivated crystal-forming sulphates to grow up the surface of the paintings such that they would bloom and shift hue in direct response to local atmospheric conditions, and so alter the rhythms and dynamics of the painting.  More recently Jacqui’s process has included the use of unstretched fabric or large paper sheets that are hung in careful arrangements so as to conceal and reveal vital passages of colour stain or loosely transcribed images.  In 2018 Jacqui won the prestigious John Moores Painting Prize.
 

This is the first of a series of exhibitions in which a large series of sheet works by Jacqui Hallum are installed in the context of an object or small series of works by another maker.  After this show, Jacqui will exhibit works alongside a collection of antique Berber rugs; a specially commissioned vessel by Phil Root made with no pre-ordained form or function; work by Dieter Roth; a Wabi-Sabi pot in galleries across the UK.  A book will be published to mark these exhibitions.

​

​

Past Event: Ann Dowker in conversation
Friday 21 September 2018 at 6:30pm