AT THE EDGE OF PAINTING

JULY POP UP SEASON 2024

By Mary Anne Francis & Caroline Pick

11 – 12 July 2024

Private View: 11 July, 6-9pm

Things happen at the edge: forms dissolve and metamorphose.  Newly collaborating, Pick and Francis prod this paradox, for painting.

Pick makes sculpture: visceral, flouncy, and translucent. Her work is loosely formed, both voluptuous and disturbing, asking to be touched while repelling touch. Francis is an artist-writer with a radically diverse practice, in which a flirtation with painting jostles with a multitude of other art-forms. 

For this joint venture at Bermondsey Project Space, Pick takes paintings off the wall and floats them from the ceiling as three-dimensional cloudscapes, surrounding the viewer with twisting and turning structures. Latex layered on to flesh-coloured organza – this is painting with no paint. Nor is there paint in Francis’ take-away exhibition catalogue which documents the abstract monochromes of Jo Faust.  Here is painting as a printed surface, flattened in a way that counters Pick’s dimensionality. And pushing further at the edge of painting, Faust’s work is also fictional – the catalogue is the first chapter of an experimental art-novel.  In the back room of the gallery, painting is propelled across another edge with Francis’ set of standing forms, which combine functionality and colour-field abstraction.

In their different ways and edging past their predecessors, Francis and Pick look to a perpetual painting practice which continually redraws its boundaries, invigorated by its intersection with non-painting.

Mary Anne Francis is an artist and writer currently teaching at the University of Falmouth and the University of Wales. She is represented by two galleries: Handel Street Projects, and Print Editions with work in Tate and British Museum collections, having exhibited and published widely. www.maryannefrancis.org @mary.anne.francis 

Caroline Pick is an installation artist with degrees in Fine Art from Central St. Martin’s and University of Brighton. She is also an award-winning documentary film-maker and was a commissioning editor at the BBC and Channel 4. She has exhibited frequently in London and the South East. https://carolinepick.com @carolinepickstudio