Transparency

Wilson Bentley, Louise Bourgeois, Marcantonio Brandolini, Anna Calleja, Patrick Caulfield, Lottie Cole, Michael Craig-Martin, Delphine D. Garcia, Anna Freeman Bentley, Kate Friend, Tim Garwood, Sarah Graham, David Hockney, Florence Houston, Aaron Kasmin, Pierre Le- Tan, Kathryn Maple, Christian Marclay, Henri Matisse, James McNeill Whistler, Cornelia Parker, Thomas Ruff, Dani Trew, Jonas Wood, Clare Woods, William Wright

Lyndsey Ingram is proud to present Transparency, a group exhibition that focuses on the representation of clear surfaces, objects and materials. Featuring artists spanning from the 17th century to today – from Whistler and Hockney to Michael Craig-Martin, Thomas Ruff, Jonas Wood, Clare Wood and others – the show includes a range of media including photography, printmaking, drawing, painting and sculpture. Many of the artists in this exhibition are showing at Lyndsey Ingram for the first time.

The starting point for the exhibition Is the gallery’s longstanding affiliation with David Hockney (b. 1937), in particular, Hockney’s images of glass tables, windows and vases of flowers – all important subjects in his exploration of everyday life. Peonies in a Glass Vase (1998) is an example of Hockney using the still-life in new and inventive ways, showing his keen understanding of distortion and how light interacts with different surfaces. The subject also appealed to him because of the technical challenges of representing clear objects.

The transparency of water is connected to ideas in art surrounding both purity and clarity of thought. Both William Wright (b. 1971) and Anna Calleja (b. 1997) have created oil paintings which allow us to glimpse into their interior worlds. Wright’s Aquarium (2023) is a study of a domestic fish tank. Painted with his signature muted palette, the pool of water is clearly defined by the graphic lines used to shape the tank. There is a deliberate tension within the painting; the lone fish which swims close to the waterline highlights the empty space above where it cannot survive. This idea of water receding is also evident in Calleja’s A Sense of Ending (2023), where bathwater, slowly circling the drain, reveals the bottom of a porcelain bath tub. With a pair of empty slippers on the floor below, Calleja’s painting is mysterious in its ability to evoke a sense of absence. Elsewhere in the exhibition, Florence Houston’s (b. 1989) Pine Essence (2023) depicts a quintessentially English bathroom. A pink bar of soap rests precariously upon the porcelain roll top bath, and in contrast to Calleja’s painting, the water here is cloudy; robbed of its usual clarity by the addition of green, scented bath oil.

Many of the artists in this exhibition use glass objects and vessels – specifically, those the viewer can engage with and look into – to highlight the transparency. Clare Woods’s (b. 1972) riotous collage for It's The End of the World as We Know It (2020) shows a tangle of different plant stems which sit within a vase of water. This is an interesting contrast to the crisp imagery and clarity of Kate Friend’s botanical ‘self-portraits,’ from the artist’s As Chosen By... series of photographs. Here the vessel holding the flower chosen by each sitter to represent themselves has a different degree of transparency.

There is also a striking comparison between James A. McNeill Whistler’s (1834 - 1903) The Wine Glass (1858), Aaron Kasmin’s Glass (2019) and Cornelia Parker’s (b. 1956) photogravure etchings. In Parker’s The Hours (2022), reclaimed wine glasses sit on top of each other in a haphazard way, their ghostly presence moving from their past life as vessels for wine into ephemeral sculptural objects. This photogravure process of printing is similar to the reverse negative technology used by Thomas Ruff (b. 1958) in Neg.Stil_16. Both Ruff and Parker play with the idea of transparent objects possessing an enigmatic quality – what is technically ‘see through’ is shrouded in mystery. Louise Bourgeois’ (1911-2010) Glass Object (2004) is similarly concerned with this paradox. Bourgeois often used glass spheres in her large-scale installations to represent her family, viewing these objects as familiar but incapable of clear communication. The object within this etching, a Lobmeyr candy dish, originally sat on Bourgeois’s table in her New York studio.

Alongside these representations of vases and objects, Marcantonio Brandolini’s (b. 1990) Unknown vessels are singular in their three-dimensional form. Placed on plinths in the gallery, Brandolini’s glass sculptures are made of cotissi, remnants of previous glass firings in Murano, Venice, where the artist’s family have been working in glass for generations. These semi-opaque vessels make us reconsider our preconceptions about glass and its transparent, fragile nature. The cotissi are made up of vibrant colours, and the glass vessel itself is more akin to a rocky lunar landscape than any of the smooth, clear vessels which appear in other works in the show. Florence Houston’s series of jelly paintings Pink Sink (2023), Wackleberry (2023) and Banana Suspense (2023), are painted on canvas but have a sculptural quality to them, with decorated plates and cake stands acting as plinths. Houston pays lavish attention to the strange texture of jelly which echoes the smooth, opaque quality of Brandolini’s rocks of glass.

One of the other motifs in the exhibition is how artists have used windows in their work, both symbolically and as narrative devices. The latter idea, which stems from the Renaissance, allows the viewer to access two worlds within one painting. Jonas Wood’s (b. 1977) monochromatic Pattern Couch Interior with Mar Vista View (2020) has a clear divide between the different patterns of interior fabrics and a denser outside background. Lottie Cole and Kathryn Maple (b. 1989) create colourful compositions which show domestic architecture sitting harmoniously within both urban and rural landscapes. The windows are central to the compositions, something which Michael Craig-Martin (b. 1941), in his restrained drawing Casement Window (2017), distils to its purest elements. Anna Freeman Bentley, (b. 1982) in contrast, creates paintings which are highly expressive and complex.

Backdrop (2023) is a study of what appears to be a 1970s bedroom interior, filled with contrasting textures of wood, mirrors, fabrics and furniture. Deliberately devoid of people, Freeman Bentley’s painting have a heightened sense of dislocation. As the artist comments: ‘This is why mirrors become really powerful in architecture; because of the difference between what is real and what is reflected. And if you paint them without giving any hierarchy to the reflected or to the physical surface, then it becomes hard to read and I really enjoy that.’

DaniTrew (b. 1989), while also using a window as a framing device, is the only artist to include the human figure. Trew, who trained as a design and costume curator, has created a work on paper specifically for this exhibition. The Cold Light of Earliest Spring (2023), shows the artist holding three stems of Ranunculus flowers, set against a backdrop of Venetian gothic windows. Both Trew and Freeman Bentley share a fascination with juxtaposing different textures – in this case, the transparent planes of glass with delicate flower petals and silky fabric. Drew chose to draw herself in the Molly Goddard dress she wore to her wedding and took inspiration from a poem by Louise Gluck, Snowdrops, where fragile flowers break through the dark soil to emerge into a cold spring light.This theme of darkness being replaced by transparency inspires the drawing, which combines autobiographic elements with Trew’s intimate knowledge of architecture and textiles.