The Contemporary British Painting Prize exhibition at Persistence Works, Yorkshire Artspace (YAS), displays three works by each of the seventeen painters nominated for this year’s prize, themselves selected from a pool of 1,200. The sheer scale of this collective endeavour can be felt in the space, bringing to mind the countless hours of artistic production occurring across the UK at any given time. Founded in 2016 by volunteer-run, artist-led organisation Contemporary British Painting (CBP), the prize occurs annually, seeking to promote and shape discourse around the best contemporary painting produced in the UK.
Persistence Works sits in Sheffield’s Cultural Industries Quarter beside Site Gallery and the Showroom, housing fifty-three artist studios and a gallery. It’s a lively and warm community – alongside a gallery programme, YAS runs workshops, crits and residencies for studio holders and artists based across the city. Programme organiser and artist Tyler Mellins told me that they had seen a lot of excitement about the prize coming to Sheffield: ‘Yorkshire Artspace and Contemporary British Painting is a natural fit. We have a shared interest in what is going on in art studios across the country today. As our new gallery was once a large studio, I think its paint-marked floor is a good reminder that YAS is a centre of production. Things get made here, as they’re being made in studios across the country.’
I am immediately drawn to the compelling paintings of ‘Highly Commended’ prize winner Olivia Sterling. Sterling’s work is bold and biting, commenting on the violence of racial othering through saccharine, cartoon-esque scenes, which, as the artist writes, ‘channel rage into gaiety’. Sterling’s piece ‘Sorry to Use that Word’ (2024) shows two women, one with dark skin and one with light, sitting under a table amongst bottles of spilled red wine with a large white tablecloth hiding their faces. In ‘Dessert du Jour’ (2024), a light-skinned woman eats a lobster with ketchup, while the lobster attempts to pinch her breasts. Whiteness dominates the canvases – the tablecloth, the creepy white chocolate caterpillar birthday cake faces smiling blankly in a row – which Sterling punctures with rich shades of red, black, brown, green and blue. Sterling reproduces and unsettles racialised ways of seeing the world, tempting the viewer in with cake and wine before deftly pulling the tablecloth from under them.
This year marks the first year of the Judith Tucker Memorial Prize, initiated through crowdfunding to commemorate the life of Judith Tucker, founding member of CBP and passionate artist, painter, arts educator. Selectors were Lubaina Himid, Griselda Pollock and Judith’s partner Harriet Tarlo. Tucker’s work explored memory, place and environment, and the inaugural prize platforms two women painters who are also exploring these interests in their work – Sophia Rosenthal and Harriet Mena Hill. Since 2018, Mena Hill has collaborated with residents of the Aylesbury Estate in South East London on a project exploring the impact of gentrification on community identity, critiquing civic planning that so often sees working class communities as disposable. The paintings here merge her studio practice with her social art practice: architectural scenes of the estate are painted onto salvaged pieces of concrete rubble from the demolished flats. The rubble canvases, with their rough edges and frayed wires, are material links to the brutality of development, evoking a shattering, a falling, the destruction of a community. Conversely, Sophia Rosenthal’s work is interested in a more intimate form of memory. Three small paintings capture fragmented evocations of being in winter landscapes as a child, depicted in dream-like detail: a hood resting on grasses, clothes billowing in the wind, a gloved hand outstretched over snow. In ‘Crisp’ (2024), a glowing hot pink kisses the grass and the edges of the figure, evoking the peace of a sunset that floods to the back of the eyes. Memory is explored as an image continuously unfolding.
A thread which ties the work of many of the artists’ practices this year is a preoccupation with ecological catastrophe. The striking work of main prize winner Daniel H. Bell questions perceived boundaries between humans and the non-human. Presented on a shadowy, curved wall, these are hushed and sinister works depicting amorphous figures melting into their surroundings in various stages of decomposition and liveliness. Eyes peer glassily out of monstrous forms: in ‘Damp’ (2024), human eyes dissolve into round fish-like eyes, and in ‘Dusk’ (2024), a layer of varnish hovers slightly off-centre over a rotting creature, troubling the viewer’s grasp on the painting. Bell barely allows his subjects to coalesce: loosely held together by membrane-like washes of paint, they are ready to fall apart at any moment, a kind of anti-figurative painting for a post-human world, inhabiting a satisfyingly mucky place.
Artists Ruth Bateman and Polly Townsend explore the role of landscape painting in the climate crisis. Townsend’s realist arctic landscapes depict glaciers, mountains of pillowy snow and endless skies, all richly composed in shades of blue and yellow. There is a sense of loss here, and a desire to record a rapidly disappearing environment. In contrast, Bateman’s works are dreamscapes painted in luscious candy colours, Eden-like in their greenery and otherworldliness. In ‘Cloud’ (2023) and ‘Made Certain’ (2024), a hot orange sky burns through cracked layers of paint and a glowing powder blue vibrates beneath a hovering cloud, heavy with the anticipation of disaster. In ‘Together’ (2024), a forested island shimmers on a glass sea beneath a pale acid-yellow sky. The yellow that both Bateman and Townsend use saturates their paintings with a quiet discomfort – with the implication that these are landscapes that are in peril.
Eric Butcher’s work interrogates the act of making art in a world with dwindling resources. He repurposes his existing artworks, and states that he will stop making art once he runs out of work to reuse. Fragments of paint that look like shards of layered rock are suspended in grids on clear glass panel supports, evoking museum vitrines and proposing a future viewer that gazes on the ruins of a culture post ecological collapse. Meanwhile, Andy Harper’s large, glossy canvases, full of entangled marks that writhe together in rhythmic, mechanical repetition, outline a tension between a slippery ‘nature’ and the human gaze which seeks to categorise and codify. Green fronds and feathered seed pods shift to reveal scaly reptile skin, and in ‘Mellifluous’ (2023), the viewer is pulled into a green heart of swirling algae and leaves. Similarly, in Simon Averill’s mesh-like works, the particles that make up the matter of the universe whir together. The visual effect is trance-like, causing the eye to draw into soft focus as each mark seems to unlatch and hover above the canvas.
Another recurring theme throughout the show is the reworking of historical painting traditions. Angela Lizon’s work playfully builds on seventeenth-century Dutch flower painting, placing kitsch figurines and ornaments collected from car boot sales and charity shops alongside bouquets of home-grown flowers in order to question ideas around cultural status and what is worthy of being painted in oil. Lothar Götz’s precise and creamily coloured shapes and lines build on a long tradition of geometric abstraction, exploring design’s impact on the psyche as something that has no clear ‘use’ or deeper meaning but which nevertheless has affective qualities. In Lily Macrae’s gorgeous monochromatic paintings, the play between light and dark pulls on the traditions of Renaissance and Baroque painters, while blurring the boundaries between figuration and abstraction with deeply sensual gestures, forms shifting in and out of focus as if moving. Davina Jackson utilises a language that is distinctly modernist to retell allegorical Greek myths, and Zavier Ellis’s checkerboard works, softly fraying like weather worn posters found on the street, reappraise the genre of history painting using cross-historical collage to bring together subjects such as the Spanish Civil War and the fall of the Berlin Wall to explore revolution and conflict.
There is also a preoccupation with painting’s role in the age of artificial intelligence. Simon Taylor’s quiet yet expansive photorealist paintings draw the viewer’s gaze to pieces of litter on a gravel floor, rendered in incredible detail. One painting shows a tiny, very sweet scrap of bubble wrap with frayed edges – as gorgeous as a photograph, and yet incredibly more so. Much like Lizon’s celebration of the kitsch figurine, Taylor places the overlooked and discarded object at the centre of his work. Finally, Dougal McKenzie’s satisfyingly loose, defiant paintings critique the role of the painter in an AI world. Noticing himself spending a lot of time gleaning images from across the internet for his work – a form of doom-scrolling – McKenzie found it refreshing to use analogue algorithms (e.g. the edge of a stick) to decide the shape of these paintings. One thing that he wrote struck me – that he repurposed second-hand canvases for these works, ‘a Sunday painter’s efforts laying [sic] beneath mine.’ The credit to Sunday painters feels very pertinent in an era of ever-increasing precarity for artists and cultural workers, scores of who can currently only work on their art during brief snatches of free time.
During my visit, there were sixty Sheffield Hallam Fine Art undergraduate students also visiting the exhibition. Their lecturers reflected on the impact of increasing cuts to arts education and art funding, which is making it more and more difficult for those from non-privileged backgrounds to access artistic careers. Against this backdrop, an artist-run prize hosted in an artist-founded space seems even more important. Beyond the task of ensuring the work of contemporary artists is recognised, the prize inspires the next generation of artists and painters and makes a future as an artist seem possible – this we must hold on to.
Jessica Piette is a writer and curator.
The Contemporary British Painting Prize 2024 exhibition is on at Yorkshire Artspace: Persistence Works, from 30th November 2024 to 11th January 2025.
This review is supported by Yorkshire Artspace.
Published 06.01.2025 by Benjamin Barra in Reviews
1,662 words
