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Vardaxoglou is pleased to present a solo exhibition with British artist Thérèse Oulton (b. 1953, Shropshire, UK) opening on 30 August 2024. It is Oulton’s first solo exhibition in London in 10 years and consists of paintings made between 1984 and 2024. Oulton lives and works in London.

For the past 40 years Oulton has held a critical position in painting towards both abstraction and figuration, challenging the orthodoxies of both. Oulton evolved a way of working from an oil painting tradition in a discipline related to conceptual art. The artist’s hermetic explorations oscillate between provocative image and sensuous form, the connection between abstraction and representation paralleling familiar tropes of Romantic oppositions between nature and culture.

Repetition is central to the work, motifs on the canvas replete with their fluctuations and permutations exist as if an analogue translation of digital information. Oulton’s paintings are repetitive in a deliberate or automatic sense that suggests a relationship to the mechanical world of image production of print, of photography, of film. Over the years Oulton has introduced discernible signs, mirrorings, readable horizons, acknowledging the presence of the visible world,  the organic and inorganic, and its crises.

In a text by Charles Hagen, he writes ‘Thérèse Oulton’s paintings reiterate a central question of any art after the great formal discoveries of Modernism: how can style or story, inherently conventional but by the same token linked to societal concerns, be united with the freedom and riskiness of formal play?’.