Place Revisited, Modern Art, exhibition review: ‘Deliciously otherworldly’
Masanori Tomita’s Window Sill, 2025. Photograph: Modern Art / courtesy the artist, Kayokoyuki, Toshima and Modern Art, London
An engaging group show at Modern Art in Clerkenwell explores the role of place in abstract painting.
Bringing together the work of five artists – Richard Aldrich, Prunella Clough, Masanori Tomita, Ahn Tran and Terry Winters – the exhibition reflects on the ways that shapes, signs, marks and other manifestations of place link abstract art to the material world.
The collection is perhaps most alluring for the sheer tactility of the work on display.
For not all tears are an evil, 2024, by Richard Aldrich. Photograph: Modern Art / courtesy the artist and Modern Art, London
From Masanori Tomita’s mesmerisingly rich canvasses, deeply layered with daubs of pigment, to Prunella Clough’s spare, enigmatic forms evocative of elusive real-world objects and Richard Aldrich’s colourful geometries, these paintings keep you looking, trying to work out what they remind you of.
We see complex surfaces embedded with the visual rhetoric of representation, as the artists all clearly speak to the familiar world of landscape, architecture and cultural representation, each in their own idiosyncratic language.
This is painting that is in and of the world, but at the same time deliciously otherworldly.
Place Revisited runs until 5 April at Modern Art, 4-8 Helmet Row, EC1V 3QJ.