Tricia Gillman – Re-View, Paintings from 2001 to Now at Benjamin Rhodes Arts, East London, April 2026 – Finally got around to hauling myself to Tricia Gillman’s latest exhibition, there really was no excuse for leaving a visit to Re-View until almost the last day of the show. Yes there was; the excuse of busy painting, busy curating Cultivate shows, busy doing that thing with EarthBall, something that just might have mentioned already and it is a non-stop operation, this monstrous Organ thing. Can’t completely miss a Tricia Gillman show though, there’s so much to like about a Tricia Gillman painting (even when they don’t involve that much paint), there so much to like about the evolution of a Tricia Gillman piece, about the evolution of Tricia Gillman as an artist. Re-View features (what I assume is a small selection of) work made between 2001 and 2025, a small show at the intimate East London gallery just off Redchurch Street, a show that fitted in alongside the last days of Tricia Gillman’s rather expansive year-long ‘Paintings from the 1980s’ exhibition at Clifford Chance over at that Canary Wharf space in all the bright lights of an East End Docklands that mostly wasn’t built when Tricia actually painted those gloriously big pieces sometime in the 80s. This Re-View show is intriguing before you even start to consider it in terms of the big Canary Wharf exhibition in as much as as it spans twenty five years and no, it isn’t just an exercise (or an experiment?) in retrospection, the paintings made in 2025 are easily as strong as anything here or in anything seen at Canary Wharf.
I love the detail in Tricia Gillman’s work, it isn’t always as obvious as it might first appear, actually her work never feels obvious, first appearance or not. This is work that once again demands your proper time and considered attention, her pieces are alive with treats; her lines, her angles, her details. There are always great conversations to be had with Tricia Gillman’s art, or in this case in this particular show, in this small room, great conversations between the pieces to pick up on as a painting from 2025 says something to a piece next to it that might be from the beginning of the century.
She’s rather unique actually, her work I mean, I don’t really know Tricia that well, there aren’t any obvious comparisons or easy (lazy?) reference points in terms of other artists when it comes to the art, i mean yes, you can talk about her being a colourist, an expressionist, a bold symbolist, she might talk of her work within the language of abstraction, you might mention Matisse or Braque, maybe Patrick Caulfield, Willem de Kooning, Picasso but really none of it is obvious, nothing is easily pinned down.
I like going to Tricia Gillman shows, I like her use of colour, her sense of colour, her sometimes bold, sometimes subtle colour, I like her investigations in terms of material, her shapes, I lover her shapes, her shape, her lines, her line, her leaves and I really like these recent paintings and her rather intense return to paint over the last year. I like that way in which she moves the paint like a jazz musician might. I really like that her paintings demand edges, that blocks might be added on top of a wooden canvas, I like that her art makes demands both of her and of us, the viewer, I just really like going to see Tricia Gillman exhibitions, Indeed this time someone commented on how much I was looking at the pieces, on how much time I was spending going back from one piece to another, it seemed a strange thing to comment on. You can’t just glance at work like this, you can’t just give it an “oh that’s nice” before you head for the wine and go make small talk. What is the point of going to a gallery if you’re not going to look properly? Pieces like this aren’t just thrown together, there’s so much consideration here, so much to be considered, so many questions to ask of the pieces, of the different directions, of the evolution, the evolutions. Like all good art, these piece require the viewer to bring something to the encounter, why wouldn’t you look at them properly?
And it does feel like it really is about both the long and short process, the relatively short process of making a piece, although that can at times take years (I have no idea how long each of these pieces have taken), and then there is the long process of viewing a whole body of work, the process of looking at a piece concluded in 2005 against (or alongside) a piece from 2025.
Do the new paintings from 2025 feel like a response to the artist seeing her own work from the 1980s in that big Canary Wharf show? Is she even aware that they might be direct responses? Tricia Gillman surely couldn’t have seen those big paintings of hers from the last century all together like that for quite some time? Not properly, not with the luxury of proper time and space to just stand with time to consider them. This surely is a small show about time? A small show about a big show maybe? It (quite obviously) isn’t really a small show and yes, I am a fan of her work; you get the idea you shouldn’t really admit things like that when talking about art or artists, it really isn’t the done thing. We must appear to be above such notions when it comes to art, we must be very serious about these matters, I am a Tricia Gillman fan and I happily admit I really (really) enjoyed just looking at these pieces, at these paintings, I enjoyed walking from one to another, looking from the sides, looking at one against another, enjoying her return to paint and the movement of it. I enjoyed this show. (sw)
Benjamin Rhodes Arts is at 62 Old Nichol Street, London E2 7HP. The show Tricia Gillmam rchbition had now ended. The gallery is open Wednesday to Saturday Midday until 6pm.
Previously on these pages
As always do please click on an image to see the whole thing or to run the modest slide show
THE ORGAN 