Mary Ramsden’s paintings track a ceaseless, ever-supple reckoning with her medium: its materiality and histories, its complex deals with figuration and abstraction, the points where it yields, the points where it resists. Drawing on ways of seeing that are both long-established and acutely contemporary (not least those inaugurated by new technology), there is an archaeological quality to the way she lays down, and excavates, strata of marks and pigments, buried deposits of time and space. With their audacious play of textures, surface and scale, these are paintings that insist on their own physicality, the impossibility of their reduction to mere image. Rather, like us, they belong to the world of objects, a realm of densities and depths.
Ramsden has spoken of painting as ‘thinking with the hand’, and her works bear the traces of a restless, embodied cognition. Uncertainty abides, along with persistent reaching for (hard-won) self-actualisation. The intellectual and the sensory are not so much translated as transfused into form and colour. A work’s limit conditions are defined, then tested, and sometimes extravagantly breached. Where depiction is in evidence in these paintings, it has a fugitive quality, as if Ramsden’s marks were not quite willing to be wholly subsumed into the pictorial, preferring to retain a measure of autonomy as an arrangement of pigment on a support. This is a glitch that is also a feature: a way of capturing and sequencing those concrete abstractions, time and space.

Pilar Corrias

London

Drawing biennial

Glasgow

Glasgow International 2016

Tj Boulting

Berlin

Wentrup

Sid Motion Gallery

Victoria Miro

Breese Little

 Blain|Southern

Kinman

Edinburgh

Leith Gallery

Atticsalt Gallery

Tate Britain

Curfew Gallery

Royal Scottish Academy

Istanbul

Pera Museum

Whitechapel Gallery

Athens

State Of Concept

Saatchi Gallery

Dublin

Temple Bar Gallery

Rag Factory

Royal Academy of Arts

Ocean Terminal

Aspen

Aspen Art Museum

Mary Ramsden

La Boissière

Launch Pad

come apart in my mouth

Small Feelings

The warmth of stones

soundproofed as a dream

felt

devil's kettle

well up

“Tall walk”

Supercell

“A toucan. Maybe a wizard?”

Cartomancy

"Here we left it"

“Then fit our vision to the dark - ”

“safe, safe, safe”

Through to the blue