Afterglow, Mary West, 120 x 150, 2025
Twilight Contemporary is excited to present Mary West with Awash, a solo exhibition of paintings exploring the paradoxical nature of water.
West’s work examines water as both requisite and destabilising - something tender and furious. Her paintings express a duality, tracing the shifting states and emotional registers of an element that is both sustaining and destructive, cleansing and polluted, transparent and opaque.
Through vivid, gestural abstraction, Awash becomes a space to consider both psychological and ecological conditions. There is a tangible balance between turbulence and calm, clarity and disorientation. Drawing from memory rather than direct observation, West blurs the line allowing the experience of water to emerge very personally and viscerally for each viewer.
The personification of water in West’s work, not literal but deeply felt, encourages us to think of water as a sentient presence, an entity that demands even greater care, understanding, and respect. Influenced by Roni Horn’s Some Thames and Robert Macfarlane’s reflections in Is a River Alive?, West’s paintings situates both water, and painting itself, within an ongoing cycle of transformation and exchange.
Mary West is a London-based painter whose work explores the shifting relationship between light, space, and memory through land and waterscapes. Blurring the line between abstraction and figuration, memories of nature inspire every work. Each painting is an emotional response to a place visited and shared. Working primarily in oils, she embraces the material’s fluidity and unpredictability, allowing chance gestures and intuitive mark-making to shape the composition. Through layered colour and movement, her paintings capture the transient quality of light, water and the passage of time within remembered spaces.
A graduate of the Slade School of Fine Art (BA Fine Art, 1998–2002), West has exhibited widely across the UK and internationally. Her recent solo exhibitions include The River Rolls On at Lucinda Dalton Gallery, London (2025); Fleeting Light at The Hyde Gallery, London (2023); and Out of Shot at The Tricycle Gallery, London (2004).
Recent group exhibitions include Somewhere and Bloom at Galerie GT, Biarritz, France (2025); Elsewhere at Cromwell Place, London (2024); The Way of All Flesh at Delphian Gallery at the Saatchi Gallery, London (2024); and A Room of One’s Own at Irving Gallery, Oxford (2024), among many others. Her work has also been presented at major contemporary platforms such as the Affordable Art Fair (Battersea and Hampstead), Partnership Editions, Purslane Art, Blue Shop Gallery, and Thrown Contemporary.
Her paintings are held in private collections across Europe, the United States, Australia, and Asia.
Deliquescing, Mary West, 100 x 100, 2025
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