LONDON.- The Mayor Gallery presents Worship Paintings, a solo exhibition of new works by Tanya Ling her second with the gallery. Comprising a series of large-scale, single-colour Line Paintings – rendered for the first time in oil on linen – the exhibition marks a decisive evolution in Ling’s practice, both materially and conceptually.
These paintings are not images of worship, but the result of it. Committed to a single colour per canvas, each work is constructed through a choreography of continuous line, drawn slowly and with resolve. What unfolds is not a pictorial event, but a durational act – patient, rigorous, unguarded. The paintings are devotional in the truest sense: not symbolic, but lived.
Line has long been Ling’s defining language, yet here it is neither illustration nor gesture. It becomes structure, accumulation, refusal. Gilda Williams has written of the inward pull of Ling’s process – a studio practice shaped by repetition and solitude. The surfaces of these new works reflect that withdrawal; they are deliberate but porous, open to error, chance, breath.
Andrew Renton has described Ling’s work as a form of “faith in motion,” noting her capacity to conjure endless variations of what appears, at first, to be the same painting. That paradox – of the infinite within constraint – is central to Worship Paintings. The line doesn’t change, yet it is never the same. The act becomes a kind of channelling, more spoken than composed.
The aesthetic lineage that runs through these works recalls the urgency of Cy Twombly, the restraint of Brice Marden, the momentum of Joan Mitchell, and the chromatic release of Helen Frankenthaler – artists for whom abstraction was a form of attention as much as expression. Ling’s paintings resonate within that tradition not through citation, but through shared conviction: that form can carry feeling, and that repetition can be a kind of revelation. Her surfaces hold that tension – between control and surrender, silence and insistence or as Ling describes, between drowning and flying – not as resolution, but as presence. Writing on these affinities, David Anfam has situated Ling’s work within this broader painterly continuum, noting its quiet intensity and refusal of spectacle.
There is no attempt here to resolve painting, or to explain it. Worship Paintings understands painting not as an object of veneration, but as an act of worship – a channelling of something beyond the self, offered through repetition and restraint. As Renton notes, Ling’s practice evokes the infinite: a seemingly inexhaustible capacity to generate variation within strict formal limits. Each painting arrives like a spoken prayer – not composed, but received. A gesture toward eternity, enacted one line at a time again, again and again.
Tanya Ling (b. 1966, Calcutta, India) graduated from Central Saint Martins, London, in 1989. Post graduation, she worked as a designer in the Parisian fashion industry before returning to London in the early Nineties to set up a gallery, Bipasha Ghosh, with her husband William Ling. Following an exhibition of her own drawings, presented in the studio of Gavin Turk in 1996 and a commission from British Vogue, she became known as one of the world’s leading fashion illustrators. During the period she also designed and produced an eponymous ready-to-wear collection. The exhibition Lines (2014) with Alex Eagle marked a departure away from fashion.
Most recently, her work has been exhibited at Lyndsey Ingram (Incitatus, 2025) and Studio Cromie in Grottaglie, Puglia (Cultura Scultura, 2024). Prior to this she showed with Ronchini, London (Tennis Club de Paris, 2024) and Harper’s, New York (Col de Montagne, 2023), LA (VH Farm, 2020) and East Hampton (Let it come to me, 2021). Other solo shows of note include Paul Stolper, London (Land Escape, 2018/19) and The Mayor Gallery, London (Tanya Ling, 2018). In 2011 over 50 of Ling’s works were acquired by the Victoria and Albert Museum Prints and Drawings Collection. In 2014 a collection of paintings and sculptures were acquired by Damien Hirst for his collection from which works by Ling were included in exhibitions Simulation/Skin (2017) and Reason Gives on Answers (2019) both at Newport Street Gallery, London. Ling lives and works in London.
