The 8 Exhibitions to See in London This June
J.J. Charlesworth, ArtReview
June 2025
Imagine you are flying. As a genre, landscape painting always takes a point of view, that of the individual painter located in the physical world, looking upon a vista that is more natural than it is urban. Feet on the ground, the painter tends to look out and up – to mountains, rivers, woods, hilltop villages, whatever. The Scottish artist, who died in 2018, quite literally took a different angle. From the mid 1990s, she painted views of the land as if seen from a great height. Pale, shadowless expanses of field and forest, lake, cliff and shoreline, bisected by and overlaid with the various forms of human habitation and industry; roads and roundabouts, motorways and intersections, factories, housing estates, airports, car parks. This cool, taxonomic view is annotated in canvases made up of spare, slow brushwork, which toy ironically with abstraction, even as they draw us to consider the landscape unsentimentally and in the third-person, to see human society as a set of systems and machineries, exchanges and flows, of people, places and materials. […]