Holding Patterns

Vardaxoglou is pleased to present Holding Patterns, a solo exhibition of paintings from 1982 to 1989 by Thérèse Oulton, the first woman to be nominated for the Turner Prize. It is the artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. In 2024 Vardaxoglou presented Oulton’s first solo exhibition in over 10 years. 

The exhibition brings together a group of important paintings from the 1980s, offering a sustained account of Oulton’s engagement with material, process, and the means of pictorial formation, whilst emphasising her significant contribution to painting in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Emerging in the early 1980s, Oulton has consistently interrogated the conditions of painting while maintaining a commitment to its possibilities, and this exhibition provides an opportunity to reassess Oulton's position within recent art history. 

This exhibition shows Thérèse Oulton’s engagement with the legacy of abstraction without adopting a purely formalist position. Her paintings foreground surface, texture, and the viewer’s embodied experience of looking. The paintings in this exhibition anticipate and contribute to later developments in contemporary painting that foregrounds engagement with the material, towards the instability of the image.