Two new shows by London-based artists tell stories, or imply backstories, through the art of painting. Both feature the same group of characters. And as so often in today’s contemporary art, these characters are all women.
The Irish Australian artist Donna Huddleston is best known for her pale and etiolated drawings of posing figures, occasionally sinister, cool to the point of chilly. To describe them as flat or linear would be an understatement. Meticulous in their airy pastel hues, they are as diagrammatic as an architect’s blueprints.
The tension lies in what they show, which turns out to be a recurring cast of female characters in this mid-career White Cube survey. A young girl in a hand-knitted pullover and rust-red flares; a blue nude in heavy gilt jewellery; an androgynous cowboy with narrowed eyes and a maroon or green Stetson: they appear alone, in groups of two, sometimes all together. None has the presence (or personality) of a portrait, and yet each represents a distinct likeness.
Sometimes the titles give a clue. Lynne, carefully worked in blue and black pencil, like some early David Hockney drawing, refers to the American feminist writer Lynne Tillman. Kira is based on Huddleston’s fellow artist Kira Freije. There is a recent painting in this show (Huddleston is expanding into new media) that presents two images of the German screen actress Hanna Schygulla side by side – in costume, clearly from a film, yet somehow not performing an exact role.
So you are staring at large representations – lifesize, in some cases – without quite grasping their status as images. Most puzzling of all is the blue nude who appears three times: on her own in Sylvia, and then alongside the young girl in a work confusingly titled Sylvia’s Mother. This figure is apparently based on the American film star Gena Rowlands, who died last month. Not that you would know, since it neither resembles nor evokes her.
But what it does offer is a spectre, inserted into the scene like the recollection of a particular celluloid image. And the child, evidently transcribed from a single photograph, might be a surrogate for the artist herself, staring straight out of these pictures. Something is being said about both the memory of reality and that of images; perhaps these works are like half-remembered graphic projections.
It is no surprise that Huddleston originally worked in film and theatre; she is intent on position, scenario, schema, set. Yet her work swerves outright drama. A woman in a hideous trouser suit, high heels and pussy bow stands before a topiaried garden, straight out of Peter Greenaway’s The Draughtsman’s Contract. All the other figures are here too, plus a dog that seems to be dappled with patches of the same colours used to describe the terrace. It might be a sketch for a shoot, but minus all the elements of narrative.
Huddleston was born in Belfast in 1970, and it feels like the 70s all through this show. She notices the height of a platform sole, the suede patchwork of a wedge-heeled sandal, the fabric braiding of a poncho. She cares about costume jewellery and giant shirt collars. Her cowboy wears period pistachio green. It is the stylised look of the era. And her intensely precise method converts to modern times too, ideal for numbering every strand in a head of expensively coloured hair.
What’s telling is what changes when she shifts to acrylic. Huddleston is still aiming for the featherweight weirdness of her thin graphite lines, but it all goes awry with paint. The child returns, holding a branch across the canvas. On one end is perched a large bat, wings outspread. It has the same coldly drawn eyes as all the human figures. But its body carries too great a burden of paint for the weightless branch and the picture tilts towards portentous absurdity.
The paintings of the London-born artist Liorah Tchiprout (b.1992) also feature a close company of female figures: sorrowful young women in long dresses, looking down, looking away, or turning forlornly towards the viewer. One sits at the back of the painting in a dark chair; another leans forwards to study what appears to be a maquette of her own self. Faces are painted with the litheness of a Mary Cassatt; bodies are slumped, collapsed, puppeted or expressively propped, like the figures in a Paula Rego fable.
A narrative builds. One figure holds up another. Two seem to be out for a walk and yet remain somehow indoors, or at least in Tchiprout’s palette of glowing, low-toned colour. The first figure acquires earrings, a little bit of makeup, a shawl. There are literary titles – Long is the day, and long is the night; I know where I stand with the skylarks – and with them the sense of a fictional world.
And sure enough, these are not just art’s painted people, literally unreal, but perhaps based on actual human beings. Nor are they just figments of the artist’s visions. Each is based on a doll, created by Tchiprout and then composed in these curious semi-scenarios: their expressiveness therefore actively staged.
There are dolls modelled on female protagonists from Yiddish theatre and on historical figures, including the Jewish dancer Els Keezer. A certain face reappears, with a passing resemblance to the artist herself. All are painted on board, so that nothing seeps into the canvas; the internal glow comes entirely from the layers of translucent paint.
Sometimes the titles are more potent than the images, with their biblical resonance (He made us and we are his). Or they introduce a mystery that the painting lacks. But Tchiprout has a gift for combining the sculptural form of the dolls and the tender intimacy that the brush can offer to double the theatre of her painted tableaux.
Star ratings (out of five)
Donna Huddleston: Company ★★★
Liorah Tchiprout: I love the flames, but not the embers ★★★
• Donna Huddleston: Company is at White Cube Mason’s Yard, London, until 28 September
• Liorah Tchiprout: I love the flames, but not the embers is at Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, London, until 28 September
