On entering the gallery, the first works visible are John Hoyland’s Don’t Explain (1983) and Albert Irvin’s monumental Crusader (1969), installed side by side establishing a dialogue between two major figures in post-war abstraction. Crusader is part of a decisive moment in Irvin’s career, when he had fully immersed himself in abstraction but was still working with oil paint, and a monumental example Irvin’s belief that “It’s possible to say what it felt like to be a human being without having to paint noses and feet.” Don’t Explain exemplifies Hoyland’s shift toward weightier, more centralised forms and heightened chromatic tension in the 1980s. The shapes read almost as a constructed monument, its stacked colour-fields evoking humanity’s enduring impulse to balance, raise and ritualise matter, from cairns to megaliths. The proximity of these two paintings is historically resonant; Crusader has not been publicly exhibited for decades, partly due to the practical difficulty of moving a work of this scale, and its presence here restores it to view within a context that emphasises continuity across generations of abstract painters.

To the right of Irvin’s painting hangs Kes Richardson’s Red Head (2026), a 3 metre wide acrylic work on PVC. Richardson’s paintings originate in small marker-pen drawings that he describes as producing “an alphabet of forms” made up of intuitive lines and shapes. These studies, often including marks made collaboratively with his children, are photographed, scaled and translated into paint so that the finished works retain the immediacy of their source. Installed near Irvin’s canvas, the painting extends a conversation about how images are constructed, linking analogue gesture with digitally mediated processes.

Positioned on the floor in front of Hoyland’s painting is Jonathan Michael Ray’s Memorandum (2025), a slate slab incised with enamel inscriptions. The carved writing was produced by Ray’s children, introducing a literal record of mark-making that connects drawing, language and inheritance. Ray, who lives and works in Cornwall, frequently begins with materials themselves, selecting stone, glass or found objects for their capacity to hold traces of time. His works often contain what he describes as multiple layers of reference, allowing geological history, personal narrative and symbolic language to coexist.

In the centre of the space stands Jo Dennis’s sculptural work The Big Top (2026), constructed from painted military surplus tent fabric, rope, chain, glass marbles and steel. Its vertical structure anchors the space physically while echoing the exhibition’s broader concern with surface as a site of transformation. Dennis’s practice examines memory, decay and material change, treating objects as carriers of experience rather than fixed forms.