…Home — though not in a way that has much to do with Bloomsbury linen chests — is also the theme of House Work, a mixed exhibition at the Victoria Miro Gallery, St George Street, Mayfair. All the pictures on show depict dwellings. Most of the works are contemporary, indeed quite a few date from last year, although the earliest is a Chagall from 1926.
This selection is therefore bound together by subject matter rather than by movement or period. But a lot of the works have an affinity with the idiom of Peter Doig (a couple of his pieces are included). That is, they are done not in front of a building but from imagination, and have a loose, slightly, well, home-made look.
The message of the exhibition is that when people paint or draw houses, they are probably depicting something else — feelings, recollections, fears. Thus, Celia Paul’s ‘My First Home’ (2016) represents the bungalow in which she was born — in Trivandrum, India — seen through what looks like a haze of memory.
Image: George Shaw, Study for Landscape with Fuck All, 2015, courtesy the Artist and Wilkinson Gallery, London, © The Artist
