LOCATION: THE BOTTLE FACTORY
21ST FEBRUARY - 22ND MARCH
PV: FRIDAY 21 FEBRUARY, 5PM - 9PM
Open Thursday - Saturday, 12noon - 5pm
SLAB will unite six intergenerational artists who explore abstraction in both historic and innovative ways, whilst celebrating their shared connection to the vibrant artistic community of south London.
Basil Beattie RA (b. 1935), a pioneer of British Abstract Expressionism, who is represented by Hales Gallery, taught at Goldsmiths College during the 1980s and 1990s and continues to live and work in south London. Albert Irvin (1922–2015), one of the most celebrated British Abstract Expressionists, also studied at Goldsmiths before returning to teach there from 1962 to 1983. His work is renowned for its vibrant energy.
Kes Richardson (b. 1976) lives and works near The Bottle Factory. His large-scale paintings, while seemingly impulsive and expressionist, are meticulously planned. Liliane Tomasko (b. 1976), a former Camberwell College student (1991–1992), creates dynamic, intuitive works, producing gestural paintings on both paper and canvas.
Lucienne O’Mara (b. 1989), born in south London and a recent graduate of the Turps Banana Studio Programme, currently lives and works near The Bottle Factory. Her work balances freehand geometry with the emotional energy of colour and the physicality of brushwork. Alice Delhanty (b. 2001) recently graduated from City & Guilds in south London. Her abstract paintings explore dynamic spatial relationships, poetic forms, and material agency.
THE ARTISTS:
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(b. 1935, West Hartlepool, UK) Beattie lives and works in Mitcham, Surrey. He graduated from the Royal Academy schools in 1961 and was elected a member of the Royal Academy of Arts in 2006.
Over a sixty-year career, Basil Beattie has remained part of a milieu of British artists whose works continue the legacy of Abstract Expressionism. Beattie was a pioneer of a new approach to painting in post-war Britain, having been significantly influenced by The New American Painting show at the Tate in 1959, in particular the works of Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman. These formative elements would persuade and mould the parameters of Beattie's work in the 1960s and early '70s, but it was not long before he abandoned a purely formal approach and developed his own type of abstract painting, which has served to distinguish himself from many other artists working at the time.
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(b. 2001, UK) Lives and works in London, and recently completed her BA in Fine Art at City & Guilds of London Art School (2021-2024).
Delhanty sees a painting as an intense, psychological object that inherently contains autobiography, emotion, language, memory, and consciousness. For her, painting is a spiritual and meditative pursuit that allows these feelings and ideas to emerge—sometimes through ‘automatic’ mark-making and at other times through problem-solving in response to those marks, in search of something true. This truth may take an abstract form, yet it represents a genuine consciousness or experience. In this way, a painting can become its own symbol and metaphor for experience and autobiography. It is the excitement of discovering or having these symbols revealed that compels Delhanty to paint.
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(1922–2015) Irvin was a prolific British artist, best known for his exuberant paintings, watercolours, screenprints and gouaches. He was born in London in 1922 and, apart from brief periods during WWII, continued to live and work there throughout his life. Irvin studied at Northampton School of Art from 1940 to 1941, before serving as a navigator in the RAF during World War II. He went on to study at Goldsmiths College where he later returned to teach between 1962 and 1983. He also taught at art colleges throughout Britain.
Irvin’s first solo exhibition was held in 1960 at 57 Gallery, London. A major retrospective of his work from 1960 to 1989 was held at the Serpentine Gallery, London in 1990. He was elected a Royal Academician in 1998, and his work ‘Blue Anchor’ (1989) is in the RA collection.
Irvin’s work developed from a time when he considered that in order to give the necessary gravitas to a painting it had to be dark and sombre, through to a growing realisation that high key colour can be crucial in the achievement of full expressive and communicative force.
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(b. 1989) Lives and works in south London and is a recent graduate of the Turps Banana Studio Programme. Her work is featured in collections such as Simmons and Simmons, John Jones, and the Currell Collection. She has been the recipient of the Painter Stainer’s Prize, the Tony Carter Award, and a finalist of the Ingram Prize.
O’Mara’s paintings unlock the linear structure of the grid. The freehand geometry attempts to discipline and battle against the emotion and movement brought by the use of colour, and the physicality of the brushwork. The limitless potential of this single compositional method allows Lucienne to explore the boundaries of colour, rhythm, and space. Lucienne’s engagement with the repetition of squares within squares is seeking to break down visual order and imbue it with a kind of chaos and poetry more akin to our experience of life.
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(b.1976, Oxford UK) Richardson graduated in 1998 with a BA in Fine Art Painting from Bath Spa University College. Recent solo and two person exhibitions include: With Ash, and Stumble (Stumble), with Hilda Kortei, FOLD Gallery, London; Passengers Through the Badlands, Auction House, Redruth, UK; Boat Races and Fizzogs, L21 Gallery, Majorca, Spain; Droor’ngs, FOLD Gallery, London and Spoiler, Ridgeway Road, London.
Richardson's practice celebrates the possibilities of drawing through large-scale paintings. He works from a large catalogue of small studies, marker pen sketches and studio ephemera which are photographed and digitally manipulated; exploring scale and image juxtapositions; often sampling and layering multiple studies; sometimes allowing the source material to remain in its pure state. These digital images are then faithfully scaled up and "remade" in paint on PVC fabric in a process that is both planned and performative. The resulting paintings investigate game-play, humour, pictorial space, representation and the open-ended potential of the drawn idea.
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Liliane Tomasko (b. 1967, Zurich) is a Swiss artist of Hungarian descent. Having attended Camberwell College, London from 1991–1992, completed a BA in Fine Arts at Chelsea College of Art &; Design until 1995, and graduated with an MA in Fine Arts from the Royal Academy of Arts in 1998.
Tomasko’s practice started in sculpture, disassembling old pieces of furniture, alienating them with ordinary materials such as wool, wire, or household paint and the treatment of their surfaces, recombining the parts and assembling them into spatial installations that refer to the domestic sphere of everyday life and living. Taking Polaroid photographs of these sculptural, often ephemeral, assemblages, a visual archive was built up which Tomasko has now referred to over the past two decades, in combination with memories, dreams and the unconscious, to express a personal vocabulary through the medium of painting.