Walks With Lost Loves

Mary West

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In 2024 Mary started off 2024 with an exhibition at The Saatchi Gallery with the Delphian Gallery group show The Way Of All Flesh. In March Mary exhibited at Cromwell Place in a group show curated by Laura Lopes and Davina Barber, plus had work included in the group show A Room of One’s Own at Irving Contemporary in Oxford.  In May, Mary had 4 works selected for Blue Shop Galleries Works On Paper 6 and was also included in a group show ‘Sonder’ with Purslane Art in December, plus a works on paper show at Sir John Soane’s Pitzhanger Manor. A painting was featured in the December issue of Architectural Digest having been commissioned by the interior designer Beata Heuman for a Grade II listed townhouse in Kensington. Mary will be having a solo show in March 2025 with Lucinda Dalton Gallery in Notting Hill and has also been commissioned to make two of her largest works to date for an exciting project in Mayfair. 

Looking at a garden, its blur of colour and form, is an experience emergent into abstraction: the loss of individual outlines of flowers and grassess in the cacophony of the whole. The garden is also the hybrid place of artifice and nature – as is abstract painting, in the work of Mary West.

Ilse d’hollander, whose paintings also hang delicately between abstraction and representation of natural phenomena, said that “it is painting itself that always remains fundamental”: like d’hollander, West is a painter’s painter. As their often temporalising titles evoke, West's paintings are rooted in moments of personal experience. An achievement spans the work: the effect of simultaneity in the layers of paint. This texture contributes a naturalism: the paint appears to have been applied in exactly the place it should be.