Narrative Paths: Browse new artists and new work

Georgia Tunesi: As a figurative painter, Georgia Tunesi is sensitively attuned to how the body moves and thinks in space. Her work deeply expresses this commitment, with subjects rendered in all their inconsistencies, bodily habits, and personalities. Layered and blurred elements set up a narrative path, whilst a muted colour palette of browns, pinks, and teals almost resembles washed up sea-glass. And if her figure’s eyes also seem glazed over, this is always a ruse. Never vacant, Tunesi hints at an anxiety always at risk of bubbling over the surface. We are perhaps reminded of a famous saying: “wherever you go, there you are”, as Tunesi’s loose brushwork brings her restless and introspective subjects to life.

Jessica Rique: In Jessica Risque’s work, tiny details found in the urban environment take on new significance. Industrial hard knocks and abstract shapes create something of a visual alphabet, providing Risque with an artistic language in which to communicate. Themes include nostalgia and the effects of ruin, which she expresses in work that truly ‘listens to the city’. Elements such a cracking wall paint or broken insulation become their own unique abstractions – poignantly dramatic in the level of detail amplified in black and white. Perhaps Risque is suggesting that these hardy, time-weathered forms have a lot to do with humans, and we deserve moments of the uncanny to reflect on a shared sustainability. Her painting work also focus on these bold shapes, drawing attention to the organic forms that contour life itself.

Sophie Perkins: Where does the inner landscape meet the outer one? Sophie Perkins uses an abstract painting practice to explore this limbo. Her work involves a pour and soak-stain technique, which uses watered down acrylic, natural pigments and charcoal to capture the energy of falling head-first into nature. See "Green Is Nature’s Basic Colour”, where a mottled verdant expanse seems to rise up the canvas, revealing its swirling and almost abyssal depths. Pure colour becomes enveloping, allowing the viewer to contemplate the relationship between colour and form. Is colour a texture? Viewers are pleasurably pushed to go against any strict tendencies to answer rationally. Her monochromatic works are similarly open, pooling pigments and playing with depth in thought-provoking ways.

Tyler Watson: Can artists ever entirely remove themselves from the process of making a painting? Tyler Watson plays with this idea, turning his emotional investment into an ironic stance that might generate new symbolic resonances. Domestic and everyday objects are suspended into nightmarish scenes, for example, see how the fronds of trusted house plant become bizarrely sinister under Watson’s eye. The repetition of geometric patterns further points to a surreal void, always breaking into scenes and jarring the arrangement of discrete forms. Hot pinks and stately blues abound through the work, as Watson’s bold colour choices specifically undercut the paintings’ flat surfaces. Wittily toying with our ideas of comfort in nostalgic objects, his paintings are startling and delectable all at once.

Katie Eleanor: In daily life it’s easy to get saddled with criticism – from both ourselves and society. Either ‘too much’ or ‘not enough’, could art be the only space where one can transcend such pressures? For Katie Eleanor, this is a tantalising prospect that she explores through an abstract painting practice. With a focus on colour combinations and intuitively working with materials, Eleanor’s vibrant work holds ever-new depths to discover. Her marble-like sensual forms glimmer and swirl on canvas, as each piece offers the viewer room to think through the works’ heady titles of ‘Mercy’, ‘Grace’, ‘Peace’ and more. A chance for insight and contemplation, the textural surfaces – created with hot waxes and oils – are like ledges on which the mind can stand, perhaps learning how to withstand on return to more mundane scenery.

Hidden Things by Georgia Tunesi