The Company
of Things

Intimacy begins with the ways an image can hold another person close. Louise Bourgeois, Lucian Freud and Mia Chaplin sit within a conversation that also includes France-Lise McGurn, Daniel Silver and Katie Fishlock. In Imogen Marsteller’s Orchids always remind me of my mother, a flower becomes a connection to someone. Hugo Glendinning’s photograph of Nigel Charnock and Nick Ballón’s Congregation introduce different kinds of bodily presence. These works invite a reading of intimacy that includes affection, performance, memory and the distance between people.

Nature moves between close observation and invention. A floral still life attributed to the circle of Joseph-Laurent Malaine meets Marion Adnams’s Colloquy and the birds of Sutapa Biswas. Zhang Enli’s Tea Garden, Fabian Peake’s The Blue Barn and works by Tamsin Relly and Pekka Ryynänen offer different ways of approaching landscape and colour. Yukako Shibata’s Eggland I brings this conversation into three dimensions. Across these works, nature becomes a subject to look at and a means of imagining something unfamiliar.

A vessel, a textile or a fragment of a body can carry associations far beyond its practical use. Naomi Gilon’s Big Paw sets a playful, slightly unsettling tone for this part of the exhibition. Ella Kruglyanskaya’s Dual Pot, pg. 92, Rachel Scott’s Untitled XXVI and Antonio Tarsis’s From the Ashes draw attention to the presence of objects and materials. Works by Phyllida Barlow, Tai Shani, James Shaw and Craig Robertson invite viewers to move around sculptural forms. Nearby, Alexander Calder, Victor Pasmore, Ray Parker and Heiko Mager offer a conversation about balance, structure and the spaces between forms.

Visibility asks how images direct our attention, and what remains difficult to see or read. Glenn Ligon’s works bring language and the material surface of the page into focus, while Martin Creed’s Work No. 3531 presents the words EVERYTHING IS GOING TO BE ALRIGHT. Dana Schutz’s The Optometrists turns looking itself into a subject. Photographic and architectural perspectives by Siobhan Doran and Michael Hill meet works by Jac Leirner, Mary Miss and Anish Kapoor. The route continues towards works by Georg Baselitz, Eduardo Chillida and Jeffrey Porterfield, where form and presence become a final point of connection.