The paintings in this show are ultimately about gravity, about what we choose to put at the top and the bottom. The precedents for these works may seem clear, we can think of Post-Minimalism and Colour Field painting, of the recent histories of painting questioned and reworked. But in this process of becoming, evolving, generating knowledge, the journey of their making is always at the forefront. 

Steve Riedell’s duck woven canvas may once have performed some other function. Folded over fabrics are used to make these paintings take a bow, they are steeped in a colour, a waxy cloudy translucence that has a faint glow. The texture and fabric of these works are full of the internal conflicts of making, these are paintings that have folded in on themselves, of processes matching the reality of their making. Whilst misshapen, it doesn’t occur to us that the structures here are broken, that the colours aren’t exactly as they should be, that this shape is not the right shape, they do however make us think differently about how we look at surfaces, colours, and form. 

Andrew Graves works with internal conflicts to make pattern, his coloured forms seeking out both harmonies and disharmonies. These are works that are explicit in the struggle to find their forms, to render the parameters of compositions that float across surfaces, that drag themselves into being – they are comic, awkward and self-deprecating. So, if these two painters complement each other, it’s not because both painters do something with the language of abstraction, it is because the concerns of the works are wholly of the world. They make us aware of ourselves negotiating these works, they ask us to engage in the processes by which they are made, framed by the complexities of space, the emphasis is on our presence in this room.