Vivienne Roberts and Niall Fairhead, specialist in works on paper by Modern Masters, present 100 Years: Translation as Invention
100 Years: Translation as Invention
It is often hard to tell when a work of modern or contemporary art was made. A lithograph by Picasso can appear as immediate as a painting completed this year; a recent work can seem to answer one made decades earlier. Once the artist's name is removed, chronology becomes less certain than the language of the work itself.
The twentieth century was a period of extraordinary experimentation, as artists challenged established ideas about what art could be. New movements such as Cubism, Der Blaue Reiter and Surrealism opened up new possibilities, but these movements were less destinations than points of departure. Their lasting achievement was to encourage artists to discover their own visual languages, shaped not simply by convention, but by imagination, intuition and inner necessity.
The work of Paul Klee exemplifies this freedom. Rooted in a deeply personal and spiritual vision, his paintings seem to arise from an inner necessity rather than the demands of a particular style or period. We recognise them immediately as Klee's, not because they belong to a movement, but because they reveal a singular way of seeing the world. Although Klee is not represented in this exhibition, his example remains central to its ethos: the conviction that an artist's task is not to follow a prescribed language, but to discover a visual language of their own.
The history of art is, of course, also a history of looking. Artists have always looked at what came before them, whether consciously or otherwise, and transformed it through the act of making. What passes from one generation to another is not necessarily style, but ways of seeing, constructing and thinking through an image.
Picasso's so-called 'stealing' of compositions resulted in wholly original works. What he took from earlier masters was not style, but the underlying structures through which an image could be constructed: compositional logic, spatial tension and pictorial organisation. By transforming these structures through his own visual language, he extended a practice that has existed throughout art history, in which established images are reworked into new forms of meaning.
Matisse offers another form of translation. His encounters with Morocco, its carpets, ceramics, textiles and spatial arrangements, entered his work not through literal transcription but through transformation. What he encountered became the means by which he developed a new visual language based on flatness, pattern and colour. Later, in his gouache cut-outs, Matisse reinvented his own practice once again, translating painting into cut paper and allowing colour to become both form and space. The cut-outs were not a retreat from painting but a radical rethinking of what painting could be.
If Picasso transformed existing compositions into new pictorial structures, Matisse translated visual languages encountered outside Western painting into his own system of colour, pattern and space, while also repeatedly reinventing his own means of expression. In both cases, what emerges is not imitation but invention: something new created from what already exists.
Francis Bacon's relationship with art history is similarly transformative. He repeatedly returned to historical images, portraits and compositions, but stripped them of their original contexts and reworked them into something that operates through sensation rather than narrative. Gilles Deleuze's reading of Bacon in The Logic of Sensation is significant in this respect. Bacon is understood not primarily as a painter of stories or subjects, but as an artist working directly on sensation, structure and pictorial force. The focus is not on influence or quotation, but on what happens when an existing image is taken apart and made to function differently.
Across the twentieth century and into the present, artists have therefore continued to draw upon existing images, structures and ways of seeing, not through imitation but by translating them into new pictorial realities. Whether working from observation, memory, art history or abstraction, the act of painting becomes a process of construction and transformation. The source may be another painting, a landscape, a remembered place, a human figure or the experience of light itself. What matters is what happens in the process of making.
The contemporary artists in this exhibition extend these questions in distinct ways.
Ann Dowker's work moves gradually towards abstraction, distilling landscape and the human figure into essential forms. Her relationship with art history is grounded in an exhaustive process of looking. Over many years, she has travelled to museums around the world to study and sketch the work of the Old Masters, absorbing their approaches to structure, space, light and composition through close observation. This engagement is not an exercise in imitation, but part of the process through which she has developed her own visual language. In her paintings, elements of the observed world become both realistic and abstract, functioning as markers and structures that regulate the picture surface. The growth of fields and gardens is condensed into shorthand forms, while the human figure is simplified into symbolic shapes. The visible world remains present, but it is increasingly transformed into a language of structure, rhythm and pictorial space.
Sara Lee Roberts works within the field of pictorial transformation. Her paintings often reinterpret the Old Masters, engaging closely with the processes through which images are constructed and reconfigured. Making becomes a way of testing, adjusting and reorganising visual relationships rather than simply recording appearances. In her paintings, explicit narrative and descriptive elements are removed, allowing the paint itself to reveal the abstract musicality of interacting form and colour. The real subject is light.
Andrew Graves extends the enquiry into abstraction itself. His paintings suggest places, moments and structures through colour and surface, yet they are not descriptions of the world. Instead, they construct pictorial situations in which perception is reorganised through colour and form. Graves has a particular sensibility towards the expressive possibilities of colour, in which colour itself becomes a generative force within the painting. His engagement with the work of Paul Klee is part of this enquiry. Klee's experience in Tunisia, where his encounter with the intense light and colour of North Africa profoundly altered his understanding of painting, offers a compelling example of how an encounter with the world can transform an artist's visual language. For Graves, as for Klee, colour is not simply descriptive but an active force in the construction of the image. Abstraction departs from reality only to reconstruct a reality of its own, governed by the internal logic of the picture.
Alongside these more overt dialogues with art history, another form of attention emerges in the work of Humphrey Ocean, often described as a 'painter of contemporary life'. Ocean does not speak in terms of influence or artistic inheritance. His practice is grounded in attention: what is seen, encountered and experienced directly. Yet his work belongs to the same wider field of pictorial questions explored throughout the exhibition: how an image is constructed, how a moment is held, and how perception is translated into form.
Speaking of Ocean's painting, Antony Gormley captures something of its essence in describing its capacity to make us 're-inhabit our time' and 're-inhabit our space', with a freedom, generosity and clarity that is extraordinary. In Ocean's work, the familiar is made newly visible. The act of looking becomes a form of translation in itself.
Seen together, these works propose not a history of styles or influences, but a continuous process in which images are repeatedly constructed, translated and transformed. Across one hundred years, painting does not advance in linear succession. It returns, reworks and reimagines itself, each time producing new forms of reality through pictorial means.
100 Years: Translation as Invention invites us to look beyond chronology and recognise an ongoing conversation across time, in which painting remains a living language, continually renewing itself through the freedom to look again.
