GRIMM is delighted to current No Longer, Not But – Work on Paper, an exhibition of latest work by Jonathan Wateridge on view on the Amsterdam gallery by March 28, 2026. That is the artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery, and his first in Amsterdam.
The exhibition focuses predominantly on Wateridge’s work on paper, an intrinsic a part of his observe. When engaged on bigger canvases, Wateridge paperwork the adjustments all through their creation and the sluggish attritional technique of altering figures and backgrounds throughout the compositions. Most of the work on paper are primarily based on these erased moments, on the ghosts of earlier choices that happened on the image aircraft, and turn out to be a approach of rematerialising misplaced states.
In these work, the staging from which the figures emerge appears quintessentially midcentury Los Angeles, but suffused with a way of the uncanny. Certainly, the usually prosperous environment serve not as locations of respite however taut psychological dioramas the place one thing ominous lurks out of view. In Fold and Home of Glass, spectral figures are staggered throughout the depth of area, as if dispersing or diverted away from a gathering on the modernist glass edifice aglow within the background. The mode of gown within the work typically suggests company at a social occasion, however one disrupted, with the figures’ arms held or swinging in such a strategy to counsel sudden motion or an arrested second. The composition is pushed by narrative however one which the viewer can’t totally calculate, this resistance to prepared interpretation including to a way of unease.
The therapy of the figures’ faces varies from the tonal suggestion of eye socket, nostril and mouth to extra finite options that, although full, nonetheless appear to dissolve into themselves. For instance, in Foreshock, a pained look is struck throughout the scarlet face, mouth barely agape, forehead furrowed, and eyes probably closed. The suited determine lunges forth from a set of workplace blinds, which themselves are starting to warp, as if the world round him is coming aside. The thought-about pout, pink lip and raised eyebrows of the face in Inside and With out are extra discernible, permitting the viewer to understand extra clearly her look, but not totally revealing her character.
The tangled limbs of Two Figures see their human kinds enmeshed collectively, the indication of the place one physique ends and one other begins solely gestured in direction of with luminous outlines. The looping steady line attracts consideration to the sculptural form inside, harshly lit by the easy form of a lampshade within the prime left. With these our bodies in movement, abstracted and rendered in unnatural color, a dream-like ambiance is as soon as once more connoted, the nice and cozy tone additionally contributing to the emotional pitch of the composition.
The title of the present, No Longer, Not But, refers, on one hand, to the truth that, as beforehand famous, the works on paper are sometimes both a research ‘after’ a misplaced portray or for a future bigger work – they perpetually exist as potentialities. But it surely additionally pertains to the second during which lots of the figures discover themselves, at an inflexion level, however one past which we can’t see the end result. The scenes depicted throughout the work can typically be learn as a second earlier than a major incidence, maybe a change of fortune or the occasion of its realisation. All through these work, the fluidity and indeterminate nature of Wateridge’s topics instil inside them a way of existential disquiet. Any certainty that beforehand might need been obtainable to them now appears misplaced.
