Annual Honesty

Modern Art is delighted to announce Francesca Mollett’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. If a place can be thought of as a connecting point of experiences, Mollett’s works tend to respond to the notion of place in this sense. In her work generally, a specific place often provides the germination for a group of works, which are then individually linked together by this shared starting point. Mollett’s new body of work for her exhibition at Modern Art has been developed in a different way, with each painting informing the next and by closely observing how the paintings communicate with...

Francesca Mollett’s work derives from observations of her immediate environment. Drawings in charcoal, graphite and watercolour inform the composition of her paintings. Anchored in the physical negotiation of their making, her paintings are made with various techniques, including impasto accumulations of paint with a palette knife, thinned paint smeared and rubbed across the canvas, and l...

Francesca Mollett’s work derives from observations of her immediate environment. Drawings in charcoal, graphite and watercolour inform the composition of her paintings. Anchored in the physical negotiation of their making, her paintings are made with various techniques, including impasto accumulations of paint with a palette knife, thinned paint smeared and rubbed across the canvas, and large sweeping strokes of colour, a process which continues the sensation of an encounter.

Mollett’s painterly technique engages a push and pull between luminosity, density, depth and surface. In particular, Mollett probes the phenomenology of iridescence, both in her experience of the world, and in the process of painting. Focusing on specific elements of an environment or place, such as doorways, rock formations, pools of water, and reflective and matte surfaces on buildings, she extracts from nature and place to produce an evocation out of time and place, yet very much materially present. Key to her process is a careful balancing of pure mark making – surface tension is created by the layering of painting marks, as they blend and contrast. Scale is abstracted, discernable forms are hinted at but never made evident, they are complicated or abstracted, constantly drawing the eye across the painted surface, allowing her painting to retain an intangible quality.

Mollett‘s solo exhibitions include: ‘Corso’ GRIMM, New York (2024); ‘Noon,’ Pond Society, Shanghai, China (2023); ‘Halves,’ GRIMM, Amsterdam, Netherlands (2023); ‘Low Sun,’ Micki Meng, San Francisco CA (2023); ‘The Moth in the Moss’, Taymour Grahne Projects, London, UK (2022); ‘Spiral Walking,’ Baert Gallery, Los Angeles CA (2022). Selected group exhibitions include: ‘The Descendants,’ K11 Musea, Tsim Sha Tsui, Hong Kong (2023); ‘New British Abstraction,’ CICA, Vancouver, Canada (2023). Mollett’s work can be found in the collections of: K11 Art Foundation, Hong Kong; Kunstmuseum, The Hague, Netherlands; Pond Society, Shanghai, China; The University of Oxford, and St Hilda’s College Art Collection, Oxford.