Lisa Ivory | The Near Distance | CHARLIE SMITH LONDON, Soho

CHARLIE SMITH LONDON is pleased to present The Near Distance, a solo exhibition by British painter Lisa Ivory. Bringing together a new collection of oil paintings - developed in parallel with Ivory's recent sell-out releases of works on paper with CHARLIE SMITH LONDON × Project Papyrophilia - the exhibition expands the distinctive imaginative world she has cultivated over the course of three decades: a liminal realm inhabited by Wildmen, nude women, skeletal guardians, and hybrid creatures that pass through darkly atmospheric landscapes suspended between folklore, theatre, and dream.

The exhibition's title refers both to the formal structure of landscape painting and to the illusion of distance itself: the tension between the belief that there is still time ahead and the unsettling awareness that the horizon may be nearer than imagined. Within Ivory's paintings, landscape becomes a psychological and existential space in which mortality, ritual, desire, and transformation quietly unfold.

Across the exhibition, recurring figures appear in shifting symbolic dramas. Female protagonists encounter Wildmen whose roles oscillate between protector and threat, while skeletal figures resembling Death interrupt scenes with the logic of allegory or fable. Acts of strange ceremony recur throughout: figures wear crowns of tiny bodies and miniature skeletons, workhorses are adorned as though for ritual procession, and shepherds shapeshift between human guardian and spectral sentinel.

Archaic in atmosphere yet psychologically contemporary, Ivory's paintings stage unstable encounters between the feral and the domesticated, tenderness and menace, devotion and abandonment. Rich in dark humour and symbolic ambiguity, The Near Distance presents painting as a space of existential theatre in which the familiar continually gives way to something strange and unknowable.

Lisa Ivory (b. 1966) studied at Saint Martins School of Art, London (BA Hons Fine Art, 1988). Solo exhibitions include Nino Mier Gallery, Brussels; Pamela Salisbury Gallery, New York; CZA, Milan; and CHARLIE SMITH LONDON. Group presentations include Saatchi Gallery, London; Ricco Maresca Gallery, New York; Fabian Lang Gallery, Zurich; and Hastings Contemporary. Her work is held by University of the Arts London, St George's Medical School Library, and private collections internationally.

The event will take place at Gramercy Park Studios, 25 Great Pulteney Street, Soho, London W1F 9LT. Available to view Monday-Friday 10am-5pm. For further information please contact direct@charliesmithlondon.com. Follow @CHARLIESMITHIdn

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Category: Arts | Visual Arts | Galleries / Art

Artist: Lisa Ivory