Basil Beattie RA (b. 1935), a pioneer of British Abstract Expressionism, presents a major new work—a three-metre painting titled ‘Remembering What Has Been Forgotten’ (2025) — that distils the defining motifs of his career. His familiar tunnels, ladders, and stairways reappear, as though decades of thought and practice have collapsed into a single moment of reflection. Beattie's approach, often spare and restrained, here takes on a maximalist intensity, a culmination of his lifelong engagement with abstraction.

Albert Irvin RA (1922–2015), one of Britain’s most celebrated abstract painters, was similarly drawn to the expressive potential of colour and form. His paintings—characterized by an energetic, almost musical dynamism—capture the physical act of painting as a direct and immediate response to the world. His legacy continues to resonate in this exhibition, linking past and present.

This interplay between generations is a central thread of SLAB. There is a ninety-year gap between Irvin and the youngest artist in the exhibition, Alice Delhanty (b. 2001), yet the impulse to make marks, to express through abstraction, connects them. Delhanty’s paintings explore the tension between spatial depth and surface, poetic forms emerging from intuitive gestures. Lucienne O’Mara (b. 1989), similarly, balances freehand geometry with expressive brushwork, her work alive with the physicality of paint.

Kes Richardson (b. 1976) and Liliane Tomasko (b. 1967) both investigate the materiality of paint in ways that resonate across the exhibition. Richardson’s large-scale canvases originate from small, precise sketches—intimate marks that expand into bold, architectural forms. Tomasko’s works, painted on aluminium, capture a sense of movement and impermanence, as if paint is still in motion, resisting adhesion to the surface

A strong thematic undercurrent in SLAB is this idea of slipperiness—paint as something transient, shifting, almost unable to settle. Many of the artists work on non-porous surfaces: PVC, aluminium, or slickly primed canvas, where the paint hovers and glides rather than sinking in. This quality links them to the working methods of Irvin, who painted with fluidity, allowing colours to merge and blend on the surface, his process shaped by spontaneity and chance.

Beyond materiality, the exhibition explores abstraction as a continuum—an unbroken lineage of mark-making that extends through time. From the red ochre handprints in Paleolithic caves to the dynamic abstractions of today, painting remains an instinctive act, a way of leaving a trace, a residue of thought and movement. In SLAB, this historical thread is made tangible, as past, present, and future coexist within a single space.

The exhibition’s scale reinforces this sense of continuity and ambition. With several paintings reaching three metres in width, these works command the space, acting as monolithic presences. Their sheer size invites a bodily encounter, immersing the viewer in fields of colour and form.

While SLAB resists straightforward categorization, it celebrates the ongoing relevance of abstraction—how it evolves, adapts, and persists across generations. Through this dialogue between artists, we see abstraction not as a fixed language, but as something continually reshaped by those who engage with it. Here, in this space, these works stand together—distinct yet connected—forming a lasting record of abstraction’s enduring presence.