La Patte: Gesture, Materiality, Surface in Abstract Painting, Huxley-Parlour, 2025

Gillian Ayres, Sandra Blow, Kadar Brock, Keith Coventry, Shirley Goldfarb, Catherine Long, Richard Long, Gabriel Pionkowski, Yvonne Thomas, Lisa Sanditz, and Euan Uglow

La Patte explores the tactile presence of the artist’s hand across a survey of twentieth and twenty-first century painting, foregrounding surface, texture, and mark making as registers of artistic intent. Bringing together artists including Gillian Ayres, Sandra Blow, Shirley Goldfarb and Yvonne Thomas the exhibition reflects on the ways in which paint itself becomes a site of inscription – of pressure, rhythm and gesture. These works remind us that the painterly surface is not neutral, but resonant with the physicality of its making: brushstrokes accumulate into rhythm, pigment asserts its own material weight, and texture resists the smoothness of representation. The title, La Patte – literally ‘the paw,’ and colloquially ‘the touch’ in French – invokes both the instinctive gesture and the purposeful hand of the artist. It suggests a space where spontaneity and deliberation meet, where the visible trace of the artist and their tools becomes a form of thought. In this sense, the works gathered here do not merely depict; they embody. They bear witness to the immediacy of encounter between body, medium, and surface, offering a history of painting written through touch.

A Theory of Love (2025), Oil and oil bar on linen, 170 x 150 cm