Unreal City, Abstract Painting in London at Saatchi Gallery. Curated by Dominic Beattie and Samuel Cornish.

18 October - 17 November 2024, Galleries 1 & 2

Karolina Albricht, Basil Beattie, Frank Bowling, Lewis Brander, Simon Callery, Haroun Hayward, Anna Liber Lewis, Mali Morris, Lizzie Munn, Selma Parlour, Aimee Parrott, Shaan Syed, Melania Toma, Imogen Wetherell, Gary Wragg

Unreal city: Abstract painting in London is a complex mixture of artistic languages, a palimpsest like the city itself. The three generations of artists in Unreal City – born between 1934 and 1995 – grapple with abstraction’s past in order to move it into the future, or at least make a viable, vivid, present.

The open situation of contemporary abstract painting requires a nimble viewer. After the heroic progress of the twentieth century abstract art now floats freely. Without explicitly articulated ideological positions, abstraction is now a matter for individual artists, each with their own motives for making images that in their different ways turn away from the visible world.

How to reconcile the unspoken demands of these diverse paintings? We may need to move from the clarity of geometry to the unpredictability of gesture or from pure formal relations to images that contain fragments of reality. Perhaps the solution is to look and feel more and to think less, responding to the open situation not by categorising but by opening our eyes, as wide as possible.

All the works in Unreal City are recent, with half completed this year. The selection is personal to the curators, although it suggests that a larger, more objective survey of contemporary abstract painting is required