Vardaxoglou presents a group exhibition featuring works by Gillian Ayres, William Crozier, Howard Hodgkin and Richard Smith. The exhibition brings together a group of exceptional paintings by artists united in their attention to place through a particular style of abstraction.

For all their differences, Ayres, Crozier, Hodgkin and Smith each master the manifestation of colour, gesture, and affect, to create intuitive and explorative visual languages. Representation is important, but each artist works without specific communicative intention towards the discovery of the image – importance is always with the method of representing. This method is a complex interplay of lines, shapes, blobs, and marks, constantly operating directly on the viewer. Importantly, it is interplay without a great deal of muddying. Areas of colour are contrasted, but not heavily mixed. Colour is used as a vehicle to isolate particular forms, and these forms co-exist together to create intense and varied communications of each artist’s actuality.

Reflecting time-stamps and personal memories, each work marks important physical places: the sound of a train; a lake; the studio; and the rain. As such, the works in the exhibition transform an aspect of lived experience – some feeling, conscious or unconscious – into a sign. This sign, complex and indeterminate, is not translatable and can only be apprehended by the viewer, looking at the work. Through these paintings, reality is constantly reimagined and revealed.

All of works in ‘The Experience of Painting’ share intentional expression of a moment in time without explicitly giving the subject away. In fact, the artists depend on the viewer to apprehend subject matter through gesture. Referring both to the act of painting and the physical viewing of painting, the exhibition’s title pays homage to ‘The Experience of Painting’, an exhibition at Hayward Gallery, London in 1987 curated by Mel Gooding.

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