Tricia Gillman Paintings From the Eighties at Clifford Chance, Canary Wharf, London, E14, March 2025 – Kind of fitting to be at an art show featuring these big 1980s paintings of Tricia Gillman on the day that the news of the passing of artist, pioneer and Space Studios co-founder Peter Sedgley reached us. This exhibition is, as much as anything else, about space, about having space, about the freedom to make big paintings. Until today I had only really seen Tricia’s paintings in small spaces, I had only really seen her smaller more recent work in the actual flesh, I had seen these pieces on line but that is never ever anywhere near enough. Artists need space to work, right now artists desperately need space to show work. We’re heading for the shining towers of East London’s Dockland, that city of gold that lies in the deep distance, well not so much gold or any tricks anyone’s tail but some kind of futurist dystopian bright light modernist hell that’s part of the process that has seen so much taken away in terms of art space right across London.
Not much of this version of Dockland would have existed when Tricia painted these big paintings in her East London studio and I’m battling the light pollution and trying to find my way through the maze of all this stuff to the big corporate headquarters of whatever Clifford Chance do, obviously something very big? We’re right in the middle of whatever Docklands this is now is, we’re on the ground floor of a massive tower of apparently “one of the world’s largest law firms, with significant depth and range of resources across five continents”, there’s a hell of a lot of police and security around these buildings, you can’t stand still for long outside in the without someone asking you (in a friendly way, I’ll give them that) what you’re doing. We’re in a massive space at the foot of a very (very) big tower and well they’ve certainly got the space to show these big Tricia Gillman paintings in their massive lobby. These six big paintings are on show for the rest of the year, until December 13th to be totally accurate, it is viewing by appointment only, tonight was a private view reception thing and well, the chance to see these pieces without having to jump through appointment hoops couldn’t be resisted. I have no idea how this show has come together or how things work, I guess we should say thanks to “one of the world’s largest law firms”.
Hey look, I’m a fan of Tricia Gillman’s work, I love her recent pieces, I love her decisions, her layers, her details, I love the pure pleasure of it all. Her recent shows and pieces, mostly at Benjamin Rhodes gallery have been rather special, this is something different though. This is what she was doing in the 80s, this is six big paintings from forty-odd years ago, these paintings were made in a rather different London and a rather different time for those of us who were around back then.
“Several of these paintings were created in 1985 in London – a city almost unrecognisable from what it has become. The year in which the first ever mobile phone call was made in the UK, when Microsoft issued Windows One, the divisive Miners’ strike was drawing to its conclusion, and when Canary Wharf was a desolate area, bereft of life, redundant following the recent departure of the working docks. The disused warehouses that lined the banks of the Thames from St Katherine’s Dock to Wapping were occupied by artists, the first regenerationists, inhabited as inexpensive studios that lacked any amenities but offered large floor areas and spaces where they could be left to create art, alone but working within a collective climate of creativity”
Back there Tricia Gillman was painting these large uncompromising canvases we’re having he pleasure of seeing today, she was painting these colourful expansive pieces, paintings that here and now feel alive (even) in this space, these are exciting paintings. Somewhat informed by art history, by “20th century French and American painting and to the pictorial structure of early Renaissance painting – these paintings were painted shortly after the artist had seen Matisse’s revolutionary painting The Red Studio 2011, then on temporary loan to the Tate”. These six Tricia Gillman paintings do kind of feel like something maybe rooted further back than the 80s and yes, they’re exciting to see on a wall in a line like this here in 2025, they feel powerful, they don’t feel like they are about power, they’re not softer but it something softer, something dare I say less forceful? They’re not demanding, they don’t need to be. The temptation to go talk to her directly about them is obviously there, I don’t really want to though, she is right there and we’ve said hello, talked about the weather, I want the paintings to do their own talking, I want to explore the marks, the colour, the flat plane, the relationships of both the shapes and objects within the individual painting as well as the conversations between the line of six big paintings, I want them to talk to me, that are…
Gillman’s work has been described as Colourist, Expressionist, bold, vivid, Symbolist and yet she firmly defines her work within the language of Abstraction. She says ‘Abstraction for me provides a terrain where I can reference the multi-layered nature of experience.’ Here’s another #43Secondfilm…
This line of six paintings are exciting all together and spaced out like this, yes, the colour of the wall behind them isn’t great, but hey that’s churlish of me. There’s something very natural about the way Tricia Gillman’s paintings work (both there and her more recent pieces), some thing natural about her placing of things, the placing of her objects, thing there to maybe be read but never very obviously. There a dynamic, not a noise, Tricia Gillman never seems to need to make a big noise. They are formal but not too formal, actually they’re just right, and there they are, right there, big paintings on a big wall in a big line. The paint itself is a big part of it, the way the marks are made or remade, worked or reworked. There are references to things, hints of still life, gardens, to the urban wasteland that was apparently around her studio back there, this is mostly the ways of abstraction and these paintings from back then are working so so well right here and now.
As much as I’m extremely grateful to see these painting here in this space, I’d love to see these pieces on a more formal white walls under gallery lighting and alongside what she’s doing now, I love the work of Tricia Gillman, I love these six paintings, so good to see them out of the studio and into the public eye, to seen them up on a wall like this, just good to see them. Excllent exhibition, a privillage to see them. (sw)
‘Few painters of her generation in this country have produced work that gives such immediate pleasure as Tricia Gillman’s.’ Mel Gooding
Tricia Gillman Paintings From the Eighties is at Clifford Chance, 10 Upper Bank St, Canary Wharf, London, E14 5JJ. The paintings are on view by appointment only but they are there until December 13th, 2025. More via Tricia’s website about the appointment thing of contact the curator Nigel Frank nigel.frank at cliffordchance dot com or Benjamin Rhodes at benjaminrhodes dot co dot uk / www.benjaminrhodes.co.uk
Previously on these pages…
As always do click on an image to fully view the admittedly not great photos or to run the slide show…
THE ORGAN 