Vardaxoglou is pleased to present a solo exhibition with British artist Thérèse Oulton (b. 1953, Shropshire, UK) opening on Thursday 29 August, 3–7pm. It is Oulton’s first solo exhibition in London in 10 years and consists of paintings made between 1983 and 2024. Oulton lives and works in London.

For the past 40 years Oulton has held a critical position in painting towards both abstraction and figuration, challenging the orthodoxies of both. Oulton evolved a way of working from an oil painting tradition in a discipline related to conceptual art. The artist’s hermetic explorations oscillate between provocative image and sensuous form, the connection between abstraction and representation paralleling familiar tropes of Romantic oppositions between nature and culture.

Repetition is central to the work, motifs on the canvas replete with their fluctuations and permutations exist as if an analogue translation of digital information. Oulton’s paintings are repetitive in a deliberate or automatic sense that suggests a relationship to the mechanical world of image production of print, of photography, of film. Over the years Oulton has introduced discernible signs, mirrorings, readable horizons, acknowledging the presence of the visible world,  the organic and inorganic, and its crises.

In a text by Charles Hagen, he writes ‘Thérèse Oulton’s paintings reiterate a central question of any art after the great formal discoveries of Modernism: how can style or story, inherently conventional but by the same token linked to societal concerns, be united with the freedom and riskiness of formal play?’.

For further information please email info@vardaxoglou.com.

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 Museum of Modern Art Oxford, UK (1986); Peterborough City Museum and Art Gallery, UK (1984); Pittsburgh Centre for the Arts, USA (1998). Group exhibitions have taken place at Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool (1982); Serpentine Gallery, London (1984); Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (1984); Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, UK (1984); Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Victoria (1986); Tate Gallery, London (1987); Contemporary Arts Centre, Cincinnati (1988); Leeds City Art Gallery, Leeds (1988); ‘Aperto’, Venice Biennale, Venice (1990); Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT (1995); Tel Aviv Museum, Israel (1995-96); Tate Gallery, London (2005). Oulton’s work can be found in the following public collections: Arts Council of Great Britain; British Council; British Museum; Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Fine Art, Boston; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; Tate, London; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Yale Center for British Art, USA.