Now Showing

Sweet Geometry

This exhibition brings together painting, photography, and sculpture united by a shared interest in how contemporary life is staged and remembered.

Cedric Christie's We Are Heroes, They Are Gods opens the show with a meditation on money and worship: rows of embossed billiard balls stand in for footballers, first made in 1999 around the idea that wealth was becoming a new object of devotion, then revisited in 2016 after Leicester City's improbable title win. The top row holds the heroes; the bottom row holds the era's most expensive transfers. David Shrigley's Don't offers a lighter counterpoint — a pink hand, a guitar, a single word of warning — the same dry humour stripped of any pretence.

Kent Christensen's confectionery paintings, drawn from his exhibition Munchies, extend this satirical thread: gummy bears set among cannabis leaves, ice cream cones rendered in jewel-like colour on gilded panels, a leaning tower of macarons against the Paris skyline. Twenty years into painting sugary Americana, Christensen has widened his scope to track a real cultural shift — cannabis moving from criminal offence to boutique retail — with an affection that keeps the satire warm rather than cynical.

Photography anchors the exhibition in lived space. Harry Cory Wright's views of the Thames and Richmond Park, from his series Quiet Ground, consciously echo Turner and Reynolds, capturing what he calls the river's "last hurrah" before London gives way to concrete. In one image, a fallen ancient oak sits in the foreground while the distant Shard glows on the horizon — a quiet study in permanence and decay. Jane Hilton's American photographs bring a drier, more unsettled note: a "COMING SOON: NOTHING" sign fenced in with rusted farm equipment. Hilton has spent decades documenting the gap between the American dream and its reality — cowboys, roadside brothels, the mythology of the West.

Natasha Kissell's snow-covered landscape offers a moment of stillness between these louder gestures. Natasha Law's cropped nudes catch women in the ordinary but quietly intimate act of dressing or undressing, faces always turned from view — closer in spirit to Lichtenstein's graphic clarity than to the Impressionists she also nods to. Tim Bavington's stripe painting translates music into blurred vertical bands of colour, functioning almost as a visual waveform.

Narrative returns with sharper edges in Jennie Ottinger's work. Her Auction skewers the theatre of the art market, while Basketball Game — one of a series of paintings drawn from literary scenes, here channelling John Updike's Rabbit, Run — finds the same absorbed, faintly satirical energy in a pickup match on an empty court. Across this body of work, Ottinger has reimagined moments from novels as diverse as Vanity Fair, Jane Eyre, and Moby Dick, always with the dark comic sensibility she brought to an earlier stop-motion film about a wheelchair tennis player willing to go to extremes to win. Ray Richardson's cowboy portrait comes from his exhibition Leftfield, a show explicitly built around music and narrative — jazz, funk, the fiction of James Ellroy, the cinema of Scorsese — treating painting as capable of the same storytelling charge.

What unites the exhibition is not a single style but a shared attentiveness to artifice — to how images, whether of gods or gummy bears, rivers or roadside America, are constructed to persuade. Sweet Geometry works as literal description and as metaphor: a culture that is polished, alluring, and quietly conscious of its own construction.