We will present a two-person stand of Juliette Blightman (b.1980, United Kingdom) and Laila Majid (b.1996, Abu Dhabi) that takes the language of abstraction and reworks it through the personal and the subjective.
Juliette Blightman’s work is concerned with the moments and fragments of the everyday. Her new series of large-scale paintings of landscape are deceptively simple. Each work has a horizon line that acts to divide a sky at dusk or night with the ground in front of it. The works nod at the history of Abstract Expressionism, but the paintings also connect to Blightman’s ongoing practice of looking intently at what is in front of us everyday. The works distill the experience of looking at a landscape, of seeing it resolve into more simple, poetic forms.
A similar impulse of reducing an everyday moment to abstraction is seen in the works of Laila Majid, whose ‘Steam’ series is presented on the stand. In these the artist has taken photographs of themselves in a bathroom mirror after a shower – the mirror is steamed up so we can just see the hints of a body or a presence. Again these are works that can be read in two ways, the first with regard to the history of abstraction and minimalism but also in a different way that brings in the presence of the artist, who subtly inhabits the work.
Both Blightman and Majid’s practice can be understood as introducing a feminine subjectivity or traces of a presence into the ongoing narrative of abstraction. Their practice acts to position the viewer in a certain way to ask what it is to be in the world, to have subjectivity in that which surrounds us.
