Jason Martin at Lisson Gallery

About

The works on display at Lisson Gallery represent a new departure for the British artist who, for over twenty years, has pursued a deeply personal investigation into painting.

Oil paint is both medium and motive in Martin’s new work. Loaded onto boards in thick impasto and sculptural in its three-dimensionality, the painters’ most traditional medium – autocratically absent from Martin’s practice over the past three years – is transformed into performative volume, its material properties made dramatic in their own right. The viscosity of oil – simultaneously slick and sticky, solid and liquid, when pushed and dragged across the aluminium and panel supports – is exemplified in the adventures of globules of paint that have resisted their gravitational pull to instead rise upward in minutely intricate formations.