THE MODERN INSTITUTE | OSBORNE STREET - Glasgow

For surroundings, Hayley Tompkins brings together a new suite of acrylic paintings on wood panels, incorporating them into an installation with painted sticks and fabric pieces. These transfigured common objects and gestural, abstract paintings mix a dreamlike quality with a sense of the ordinary. Tompkins’ exhibition title provides no specifics or location, and instead suggests an ever-changing set of circumstances, conditions and possibilities; both a position unique to each person and a shared set of coordinates for seeking commonalities and sympathies with others. In this way, the title speaks to the act of installing the works to create a temporary environment for the viewer. The expressive paintings often feature a staccato line and sections of rhythmic colour, evocative of unrest and fracture but also the optical effects of dappled light falling on the surfaces of a room. They show a subtle but decisive shift towards figurative depictions, with areas suggestive of landscapes, plants and windows, and also biomorphic forms recalling heads or limbs. The compositions never insist upon representation, instead the florid, brightly coloured nature of their surfaces are aligned with Symbolist painting, foregrounding gesture and dreamlike forms which can act as a metaphors for ideas around interpersonal relationships, and the coexistence of love and loss. The paintings are developed intuitively, products of imagination as well as intensive bursts of physical energy. Their starting point is often a feeling, with Tompkins recollecting and responding to associated interiors, places and artworks. They also have a complex and questioning dialogue with historical painting, specifically artists who worked at the intersection of abstraction and figuration, merging interior thoughts with external representations. There are current affinities to be found with Graham Sutherland’s surrealist landscapes from the 1930s and 40s, the lyrical abstraction of Joan Mitchell’s oeuvre and Henri Matisse’s rich interiors and cityscapes. The playful sticks, transfigured fragments from a dérive , create a journey through the space. A touchstone for their other-worldly properties is Romanian conceptual artist André Cadere’s (1934-1978) colourful barres de bois rond (round bars of wood), which he made hundreds of, taking them around Paris and exhibiting them. As with Cadere’s use of his bars, leaning them against a wall or walking them somewhere, Tompkins’ installation of the sticks draws attention to the space itself, creating a lively set of chromatic connections with their environment and neighbouring works. In turn, the shirt fragments and sections of fabric invoke an absent body. Their colouring and mark making chime with the paintings, blurring associations with punk clothing alterations and accidentally stained garments. Collectively, there is a sense of intimacy across the constellation of works – each seems to denote a small thing remembered or noticed, collected, kept, and altered.

Jesse Wine’s new cycle of sculptures move in two directions, materially and conceptually. At once involved with the pull of memory and imagination as well as mass and the drag of gravity on bodies. Wine’s use of material creates this dialectic, with the show utilising a productive disjuncture between his more established work in clay and a newer body of work in bronze which the artist began following the loss of his father. The latter capture the sense of a renewed gaze, with attention paid to the poignancy to be found in the placement of objects and in small details. They have a lightness, incorporating casts of thin, intricate forms which often float or appear in suspension. In contrast, clay – itself the product of compacted force and compression – is used to depict bodies pulled down by their own heft. Together, the installation can be understood as bringing together notions of physical and spiritual pressure, alluding to the way our minds and bodies are often shaped by forces and events out of our control.

For his first solo show at The Modern Institute, Osama Al Rayyan brings together a new suite of oil paintings on canvas and intimately scaled bronze sculptures. The paintings depict lone people or small groups, capturing a moment of ambiguous action. Their bodies and garments are richly rendered, and the paintings’ chromatically dense environments are key to their atmosphere – the air feels thick with an indefinable tension. The figures appear as if in the aftermath of an event, or else waiting for something to happen and simply attempting to pass time. There is a melancholy aspect to Al Rayyan’s various enigmatic scenes, and his figures often seem contemplative with eyes downcast. The head is also the focus of his bronzes and both show countenances with their eyes closed, as if at rest. While they share figurative concerns with his vivid paintings, their sombre and plain character stands in contrast to them.