LONDON.- Vardaxoglou is presenting ‘Holding Patterns’, a solo exhibition of paintings from 1982 to 1989 by Thérèse Oulton, the first woman to be nominated for the Turner Prize. It is the artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. In 2024 Vardaxoglou presented Oulton’s first solo exhibition in over 10 years.
The exhibition brings together a group of important paintings from the 1980s, offering a sustained account of Oulton’s engagement with material, process, and the means of pictorial formation, whilst emphasising her significant contribution to painting in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Emerging in the early 1980s, Oulton has consistently interrogated the conditions of painting while maintaining a commitment to its possibilities, and this exhibition provides an opportunity to reassess Oulton's position within recent art history.
The repeated association of landscape with Oulton’s painting only partially accounts for the complexity of her approach. In fact, they are as much about the shattering of landscape to reveal other scales, possibilities, and forms, dissolving the boundary of figure into landscape, and landscape-as-figure. Oulton consistently takes particular qualities from an object and reattaches that quality to the expressiveness of the paint itself. For example, in Incognita No. 5 (1985) Oulton might paint the gleam of bronze in the sunshine without describing a metallic object; or in Hermetic Definition (1987) and Viscous Circle (1989), the pearlescence of flesh, the boniness of the skeleton, without describing the body.
The earliest painting in the exhibition, Space for Leda (1982), still references land, sea, and atmosphere, yet they remain contingent upon the capacities and workings of paint itself. Form is not predetermined but arises through the accumulation, displacement, and reworking of pigment, shaping an image that hovers between evocation and abstraction. The title Space for Leda shows an engagement with a long visual tradition, revisited through a painterly language that resists a narrative framework.
In paintings such as Shades of Umbria VI (1983) and Germination (1983–84) the application of pigment ranges from controlled layering to more immediate, tactile gestures. Architectural and topographical elements are compressed into dense pictorial fields that draw on both observation and memory, while resisting fixed spatial organisation. The surface operates as a site of negotiation in which image and material remain in active relation.
The composition of Parallel Action (1986) is structured through the convergence of contrasting directional forces. Distinct currents of colour and form intersect within the picture plane, producing a sense of simultaneity that challenges singular perspectives. The painting’s title suggests both a cinematic and conceptual framework, reinforcing an understanding of the work as a field of ongoing activity rather than a resolved image.
This exhibition shows Thérèse Oulton’s engagement with the legacy of abstraction without adopting a purely formalist position. Her paintings foreground surface, texture, and the viewer’s embodied experience of looking. The paintings in this exhibition anticipate and contribute to later developments in contemporary painting that foregrounds engagement with the material, towards the instability of the image.
Thérèse Oulton (b. 1953, Shropshire, UK) studied at Saint Martin's School of Art (1975-79) and the Royal College of Art (1980-83). Oulton was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1987 and has held solo exhibitions at Vardaxoglou Gallery, London, UK (2024, 2026); Museum of Modern Art Oxford, UK (1986); Peterborough City Museum and Art Gallery, UK (1984); Gimpel Fils, London, UK (1984); Pittsburgh Centre for the Arts, USA (1998); L.A. Louver, Los Angeles, CA (1991, 1994); Hirschl & Adler, New York, NY (1989); Marlborough Gallery, London, UK (1988–2010). Group exhibitions have taken place at Andrew Kreps, New York (2026); Vardaxoglou Gallery, London (2025); Vacancy, Shanghai (2025); Yale Center for British Art (1995); ‘Aperto’, Venice Biennale, Venice (1990); Leeds City Art Gallery, Leeds (1988); Contemporary Arts Centre, Cincinnati (1988); Tate Gallery, London (1987); Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Victoria (1986); Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, UK (1984); Serpentine Gallery, London (1984); Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (1984); Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool (1982).
Oulton's work is in the public collections of Arts Council of Great Britain; Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery; British Council, London; British Museum, London; Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge; Government Art Collection; Harris Museum and Art Gallery, Preston; Leeds City Art Gallery; Mead Gallery, University of Warwick; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Fine Art, Boston; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; Peterborough City Museum and Art Gallery; St Louis Art Museum, Missouri; John Moores, Liverpool; Tate Gallery, London; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Yale Center for British Art.
