– Helmut Federle 1992.

Points of Orientation seeks to re-engage the viewer with the notion that cultures have, for thousands of years, been making and re-making objects of both practical and metaphorical importance and that this repetition provides critical coordinates that cross spiritual, social and existential dimensions. 

This is the third time that I have made Points of Orientation. Each time I have done so has probably coincided with my rising level of frustration with popular cultures obsession with newness… though were this true, it would likely be running perpetually. Newness as a criterion for garnering attention is frankly conceptually bankrupt, but that is what we are told people want. Of course, I don’t believe this any more than “painting is dead” or that if you’ve seen it online, you’ve seen it.

The artworks and the objects that comprise this iteration of Points of Orientation have come together over just a small portion of our lifetime and yet they span more than 6000 years. As I write this, it feels simultaneously incomprehensible and axiomatic. Though most all of us no longer actually make anything, for many of us our desire to apprehend our world through an analogue window remains persistent and strong. This reliance on facility, whether it is driven by pragmatism or something more rarified, or indeed a conflation of both aspirations, lies at the heart of Points of Orientation.

Though sandwiched as I am between physical clumsiness and intellectual laziness, I have at least recognized that I need to be witness to this glorious regime of making and to take vicarious pleasure of learning by proximity.

Over many years now I have been fortunate to have had conversations with Helmut Federle. They are attenuated by distance and time but seem to pick up seamlessly where they left off. There are shared running concerns about the art world’s apathy or scepticism for art to shoulder the kinds of conceptual and moral obligation that it has been capable of. His lament for the dignity that was due to it, is real. 

So, Points of Orientation exists as both a celebration and a lament. At the very least it is reminder to me that the long arc of time may indeed bend towards hope and justice, but also that if we no longer make, our capacity to materialise meaning will evaporate and so too our ability to affect change.

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Willem de Kooning

Looking at the bustling, electric gesture of Todd Hunter, feeling the way that the colours collude with this buoyancy, it is not hard to understand the deep affection he has for de Kooning. 

The drawing that was so foundational for de Kooning, both as procedure, but also as a way of splicing thinking and feeling, allowing space for intuition, is also crucial in the daily practice of Todd Hunter. Drawing is where the day begins, and from time-to-time it bookends it. This quieter, more meditative conduct has become part of a regime that sees painting resting on the DNA of those drawings, if not structurally, then certainly psychologically.

The women that burst through de Kooning’s expressionist labyrinth also lurk in the fabric of Hunter’s paintings though they are only hinted at, insinuated by the sweep of a thigh, the curve of a buttock or breast – much as they do in Cecily Brown’s paintings, occasional limbs in a swirling, troubled landscape – a raw up-dating of Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe.

In these newest paintings of Todd Hunter there is increasingly evidence of drawing, more the way that the brushstroke is charged with a soulful, expressive imperative rather than a structural skeleton.

Todd Hunter is a painter of rare tenacity. He paints big and he paints with considerable conviction and risk. I think about Hunter’s reverence for de Kooning in the same way that Nick Cave held the deepest admiration for Leonard Cohen as the greatest songwriter of all. For Nick Cave, Leonard Coen opened the door to the richness and risk of confession. There is a transaction between de Kooning and the generation of painters like Cecily Brown and Todd Hunter where the best actions become historical and rest meaningfully upon other artists.

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CINDY LEONG

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My paintings are not about what is seen. They are about what is known forever in the mind.

Agnes Martin

Leong’s paintings, with their quiet atmosphere and exquisite marriage of intuition and structure, simultaneously situate themselves within the aesthetic traditions of minimalism and the influence of her own heritage. The paintings possess a gentle and inevitable hybridity, where gesture exists as evidence of communicative intent while remaining liberated from the complex weight of authorship.

Leong’s use of regular cadence feels almost mantra-like, yet the apparent repetition is never offered without heightened feeling and awareness. Instead, it serves her deeper desire to uncover an intangible, metaphysical existence through the objective expression of the physical and the spiritual. 

 

Her largely reduced tonal palette allows a space to emerge that quietly vibrates between the dermis of the paintings and the half-shadow that exists between their viscous gestures. One thinks of Tanizaki’s recollection in In Praise of Shadows of Louis Kahn’s observation: “The sun never knew how wonderful it was until it fell on the wall of a building.” The undulating topography of Leong’s surfaces fulfils a similar possibility. 

The accumulation of her brushstrokes resists obvious pattern and system. Instead, they form a natural, web-like cohesion that holds the composition just sufficiently for us to feel that what we are apprehending is transitory— like holding water.

Agnes Martin’s statement makes it evident that memory or rather a shared consciousness is as vital to the apprehension of painting, as is “what is seen.” Leong’s paintings very much evidence that vision itself is an act of remembrance – that the constituency of the painting, its union of material and gesture, is a celebration of perception and recollection.

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Each of these painters share in the knowledge that observation is the foundation of perception. Their common enthusiasm for the figure, the landscape and the still life is in some small part driven by what is at hand, but each painter invest these humble subjects with an emotional and psychological layering that elevates them. Crucially, it enables the paintings conceptually, making it clear that painting is a conceptual act in and of itself. 

Gideon Rubin paints with an understatement and material economy that appears initially to be something of a foil to the paintings each of which are filled with humanity and emotional range. 

Rubin’s understatement serves his intimate surveillance of the figure. Rubin’s observations of the partially clad have a home-grown eroticism about them – a polaroid candour that celebrates and the privilege of privacy and the humanity of the subject. 

As alluring as his images are, it is the judgement about tone, the way that brushstrokes don’t describe form but simply become it, is extraordinary. There is a weightlessness to his touch where the gentlest of caresses guide the pigment, free of theatre, letting it rest within the fine linen weave. 

Each of Rubin’s paintings is simultaneously portraiture and not. The anonymity of his sources reflects a deeper symbolic namelessness and yet they are anything but absent of deportment and soul.

Niyaz Najafov makes Still Life paintings but clearly there is little, if anything, that is ‘still’ about these extraordinary works. His fecund blossoms lean dangerously out over the rims of his precocious, wonky vases so much so that any sense of visual stability vanishes and with that the comfort that a polite floral arrangement should instil. 

With most Still Life painting being determinedly domestic, such large and carnivorous arrangements feel antithetical. In the hands of Morandi, certainly one of the greatest Still Life painters, the composition of his works was held together by unexpected compositional gymnastics, routines and arrangements that defy logic but given the latitude that painting grants vision, they made all the sense in the world.

Morandi’s use of softer, tonal arrangements bestows the paintings with a calmness and poise, despite their structural whimsy. Najafov however, prefers the painterly outrage and volatile viscosity of Soutine. His blossoms are whipped into a frenzy of colour and tactility. They simultaneously appear fully hydrated yet set to flare, erupting like small volcanoes of molten colour.

And turn away from them for a second and one senses them shifting within the picture frame, creeping, triffid-like towards us… like Seymour, they are begging to be fed.

My first encounter with Niyaz’s paintings was at the home and studio of Sofie Muller in Ghent. A small, postcard sized painting was resting on the piano. Each time I passed it, I was transfixed by its muscularity, but also its unexpected elegance. Najafov can really paint and clearly, he can draw. The combination of such flamboyant, graphical ability and such a capacity with oil paint feels uncommon. But what is perhaps most compelling about these works is the way that they carry an emotional and psychological burden, an intensity that is reflected in their wild material life but ultimately, they transcend this weight and one is left to revel in his electric facility. 

Speaking of electric facility, Todd Hunter is a painter with a voltaic gesture that gives his paintings a dynamism and energy that is compelling. Like Najafov, Hunter draws as a matter of daily routine. Each workday is book-ended with drawing. For Hunter it is a fundamental orienteering process, one that is much more than note taking/making for painting. Though the DNA of every painting is inferred from his drawing, paintings bring their own specific demands, and each must be solved according to those, rather than the swifter schematics that drawing might provide.

Having said that, we can see in many of Hunter’s newest paintings that drawing, or at least the forensics of it, are increasingly visible. The desire for paint to fill the field has quietly lessened and the role of colour and gesture in shaping deeper form has grown.

In Ripe we see grand new paintings of Hunter’s that allow his mostly discrete figuration to become more evident. In a sense Hunter has long conflated the landscape and the figure producing paintings that are a magnetic amalgam of both genres. The sweeping gesture is more aligned to the curve of human form, the jagged staccato gestures and the saturated colour are more agitated and rustic. 

Alongside these two new paintings we will present a suite of drawings that demonstrate just how marvellous Todd Hunter’s first and last light of day efforts are and give us insight into the regime of observation and response.

Robert Malherbe’s eye is perhaps more ecumenical than either that of Hunter or Najafov. A swift painter of the landscape ‘plein air’, a saturated blossom or the curve of a hip or a breast, Malherbe brings the same velocity and immediacy to his brushwork. Whatever his gaze is upon he relies on a reservoir of looking so each new painting is informed by a long line of observation and judgement.

Though Malherbe’s Still Life compositions are not as wildly anthropomorphic as Najafov’s, nor his gesture as spikey as Hunter’s they share a common energy and love of the material. Looking at Malherbe’s works it is evident that he loves paint and its capacity to be compliant… and not. Each work has a compression, a density to it… psychologically different, certainly to Najafov’s theatre of unease, Malherbe’s works have a celebratory feel to them. It is as if the paint wants very much to be complicit in this making. I’m sure that often it is not and that the choice to paint, to move quickly and to risk something in pursuit of something greater is not easy at all, but these paintings have made a bargain with joy and with vision, knowing full well that both are fugitive states – but that by the act of painting we can arrest that moment for a time.

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Colour is, for each of them a fundamental constituent in their work because it is a fundamental element in their sensory existence. It animates their consciousness in the same way that music does for many – it is almost like air and water.

Each version of The Architecture of Colour has also made it clear that for these painters colour is capable of not only animating the heart and the soul, but that it is structural – both the architecture and compositions of their paintings and indeed their wider world is measured and ultimately understood through the infinite lexicon of colour.

Fox Jensen McCrory are delighted to present The Architecture of Colour IV where Bill Culbert’s luminous neon grids, Imi Knoebel’s sliding geometric collages, Ian Davenport’s gravity fed zips, Mark Francis’s oscillating colour-codes, Tomislav Nikolic’s Baroque ensembles, Lucienne O’Mara’s flagrantly gestural grids and Winston’s Roeth gloriously iridescent topographies are united by colour, by light and sensation… and architecture.

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Beneath their tenacious surfaces lies a web of lyrical gestures, that are more about personal ceremony and establishing her own physiological cadence than being a dominant substrate to the paintings. They anchor the body of the painting philosophically more than architecturally. They swiftly become fugitive, subsumed by a newer approach to more robust material. Though vestiges of the initial calligraphy sometimes remain visible, especially at the edges of the canvas – as if the heavier body of pigment has retreated in a late seasonal thaw – their role reminds us, that what matters is not always visible and what is visible is built upon procedures and transactions that form an orienteering journey that concludes with resolution more than destination.

Look closely at the surfaces and you can sense something of their construction as pigments rasp and abrade over an ever-developing body. You can almost hear the pigment, feel its advance, witness its progress as it negotiates with the linen. This exchange between energy, material and support is at the heart of Topfer’s work. My repeated analogies to weather systems, to the hushed environment they inhabit is simply an attempt to apprehend them assisted by allegory. Truth is, all they ask of you is to look as if you were listening – with a little patience and composure knowing that time was a crucial ingredient in their making and ought to be reciprocated by the viewer.

This Is the third solo exhibition Jenny Topfer has made with the galleries. Her work has also been included in projects The Anatomy of Gesture and Permafrost. She will be present at the opening, all welcome.

Andrew Jensen, May 2026

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Aida Tomescu has an ecumenical faith in the capacity of art, literature and music to alter our lived experience. Her devotion to painting is unquestioned but so too is her faith in Dostoevsky, Celan, in Shostakovich. These shared convictions demonstrate an uncommon sensibility, one that celebrates the metaphysical, the abstract and the profound and she was to find this in the work of Colin McCahon more than thirty years ago.

Aida speaks about McCahon with the same thrill and reverence that she speaks of Titian and Giotto, of Guston & Cezanne. What they hold is an intellectual weight and a profound content freed of illustration and description. This capacity to hold a long thread of attention between two points is fundamental to the making of good art, music and literature. 

Colin McCahon is Tomescu’s antipodean window, one she didn’t expect to see through let alone open for us all.

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Saul Bellow

Saul Bellow probably didn’t have Marilyn Monroe in mind and nor she when she famously said “I defy gravity”. For a time Marilyn certainly seemed to as her star soared, resisting the weight of expectation before gravity, combined with the pressures of fame caused her to come crashing down.

Our common understanding of Newtonian gravity is apprehended through the body and the forces that act upon us and certainly, my rather flimsy appreciation of the science doesn’t allow for any useful insight into the physics of it. The notion of gravity – one that is about force and perhaps even about the pressure that the best artworks can exert equally on our body and our consciousness, is one that if we are fortunate, we might experience from time to time with art.

Each of these painters leverage the science, co-opting the relentless agency of nature to assist in their making – but none are beholden to it, indeed some flat our resist it  These are not ‘paintings as hypothesis’ – systemic experiments seeking proof of anything. Indeed, my sense is that they are delighted when their laboratory experiments goes awry. Out of fluidity and flux comes opportunity.

For Ian Davenport, John Armleder and Paul Czerlitzki in particular, gravity encourages their material’s (mis)behaviour – Koen Delaere, Mark Francis, Ingo Meller and Callum Innes chose to work both with and against this invisible force in the pursuit of an esoteric dualism. All appreciate that exploring and exposing evidence of the fundamental forces that determine the actuality of our world, offers them the possibility to express something fundamental about our shared experience, it’s perpetuity and our fragile limitations. 

These partnerships between intention, material and physical action and their diverse consequences utterly transcend any notion of process and speak to systems that are as much unknown as known. This leap of faith that each take on the springboard of making is at the heart of our fascination with what they do and express each day and even if, like Marilyn and Icarus, flight is temporary, levitation remains the most alluring trick.

For Gravity, Fox Jensen has assembled major artworks by some of the most serious and considered painters working today. We are humbled by their support of this exhibition and look forward to seeing you.

Andrew Jensen, April 2026

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 Johnny Rotten Holidays In The Sun 1977

 
There have been few moments of such symbolic social and political union as the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989. With the demolition of this horrifying barricade came an almost universal restoration of hope and faith. Yet little more than 25 years later, one can hardly believe that a political rally in the re-drawn West, the so-called “land of the free,” could be fueled by the moronic chant to  “build the wall.”
 
Amidst the Cold War, Johnny Rotten saw the Berlin Wall as a kind of modern stand-in for Nietzsche’s philosophy “When you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back at you.” The implication being that accusations of moral decay and chaos are most often a reflection of one’s own character. The wall is less a wall than a mirror and that anxiety, inequities and corruption exist on both sides.

Jan Albers was just 18 when the Berlin Wall came down. By that time such was its promised potential for social and philosophical healing that Sir Elton had written Nikita and Nena had set free 99 Luftballons – so any chance it was going to outlast the Reagan and Gorbachov détente was slim. Popular culture had the bit between its teeth and Sir Elton was coming for Nikita despite the flagging resistance of ten tin soldiers.
 
It is hard not to see Jan Albers’ grand chainsaw massacre works as fragment of a wall, be it Berlin or another. The sense of them being a geological remnant, a fragment from an earlier brutalist age is strong. His decision to enclose them in a clear Perspex box immediately shifts our perception of them from rubble to relic. The notion that an object might magically morph from raw or ‘found’ status to conceptual/aesthetic object by virtue of context is not new, of course. And though Albers certainly isn’t taking up the mantra of Dada, as a student at the Kunst Académie Dusseldorf, he adopted a post-punk approach to authority, and indeed to painting, preferring to cut, burn and even chain-saw his forms. Whilst these are sculptures that allude to mysterious artifacts, their repeated architectonic compositions, especially in the “wedges” imbues them with a crisper, even classical formality. Albers might’ve resisted the protocols of painting, certainly the ceremony of neatly folding linen corners, especially when the allure of setting to with a chainsaw or a flame-thrower beckoned. But what he couldn’t quite set aside were the fundamental attractions of colour and light. In this sense he is just as much a disciple of Monet as Duchamp…. Impressionism meets the concrete block.
 
It is Albers’ conflation of sculpture and painting that places his work in the lineage of Donald Judd and certain aspects of Imi Knoebel, both of whom, like Albers, seem dissatisfied with the confinements of painting. The desire to liberate painting from the easy seduction of the pictorial is vital for Albers’ work too, whether it takes the form of the faceted wedges, or the chainsaw massacres he is intent on escaping the restrictive orthodoxies that history establishes..
 
The hybridity of his approach gives the works a flamboyant contemporaneity and Albers himself sees the studio as a working Tardis that jettisons him into the future – to infinity and beyond. The desire to see one’s own work unshackled from history might appear to wilfully deny aspects of the works complex genealogy but Albers is determinedly forward facing in all that he does. For all their connections these are artifacts from the future.

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