Issuu

PRESENTS Domus Meus

Paul Smith Space is delighted to present DOMUS MEUS

A thought-provoking group exhibition that examines the deeply personal and varied interpretations of “home.” Running from November 22, 2024, to February 9, 2025, DOMUS MEUS features eleven contemporary artists who reveal unique facets of the home as both a physical refuge and a spiritual or emotional haven. The exhibition focuses on intimate objects and spaces that, in their familiarity, help shape our identity and sense of belonging.

DOMUS MEUS invites viewers to explore what “home” represents for each of us, especially during the winter season, a time often associated with family gatherings and warm, comforting environments. Through their varied interpretations, the artists in this show capture the beauty and complexity of home life, from its architectural form to its emotional weight.

Ian Archie Beck

Eleanor Moreton

Jack Dunnett

Anna Freeman Bentley

Maggie Hills

Nancy Cadogan

Caroline Walker

Beatrice Meoni

Heidrun Rathgeb

Martha Cooke

Marilyn Hallam

Ian Archie Beck

Ian Archie Beck was Born in Hove, Sussex in 1947. At school he showed an interest in drawing and painting and was encouraged by both the art teacher and the headmaster to attend Brighton College of Art Saturday morning art classes. He eventually went to the art school as a full time student in 1963, studying illustration and graphic design.

He graduated in 1968, and shortly afterwards moved to London, with his portfolio of drawings to try his luck as a freelance illustrator. He gradually built up a client list, mainly working for mainstream consumer magazines like Good Housekeeping, Cosmopolitan, and Homes and Gardens. He also began making drawings for the recording industry. At first these were just trade advertisements for performers like Ry Cooder and Richie Havens. Later in the early seventies designing and illustrating album covers as well, for example the triple gatefold album ‘Goodbye Yellow Brick Road’, for Sir Elton John. He continued to work in this field until the early 1980’s, also producing work for most of the leading design groups, advertising agencies, newspapers, and magazines.

He was approached by the Oxford University Press, who had seen some drawings he had made for the Radio Times. The designer at the OUP felt that the style of the drawings would suit a project which they wanted to publish. This became his first book for children, Round and Round the Garden, an illustrated collection of finger rhymes and games. He also showed paintings and watercolours at both the Thumb Gallery and The Francis Kyle gallery through the 1970s, 80s and 90s. He married Emma, youngest daughter of the distinguished Wood engraver, painter and letter cutter Reynolds Stone in 1977 and they have three children and two Grandchildren.

He has illustrated over one hundred and forty books. He has had three one man exhibitions at The Art Workers’ Guild, and one at London Framing in Hammersmith. He has been president of the Double Crown Club, and Master of the Art Workers Guild. During the pandemic Lockdown he painted a whole series of pictures of his local suburban area in west London which were later published in book form, as The Light in Suburbia (Unbound 2022). He followed this in 2024 with another collection Illuminating The Everday (Red Boat Books). He continues to paint full time.

I paint the things closest to me. The interiors of my house. My suburban garden in west London. Flowers from the garden or items of china, jugs, cups etc. I sometimes paint in watercolour, usually heightened with body colour and black pencil. I also paint in acrylics on either a canvas surface or coarse linen. I like to observe the light falling on things at different times of day and the changing seasons on the suburban townscape around me. I find that these are subjects that reward constant attention and evoke a sense of quiet intimacy.

Ian Archie Beck

Watercolour

42.2 x 41.8 cm

Sunlight on the New Plaster Wall, 2023

Watercolour

41.8 x 51.8 cm

Ian Archie Beck

Light Through the Curtains

St Margarets, 2023 £1,140.00

Acrylic on linen

39.3 x 49.6 cm

Acrylic on linen

32.9 x 39 cm

Ian Archie Beck

Acrylic on linen

32.9 x 39 cm

Eleanor Moreton

Eleanor Moreton grew up in Berkshire and studied painting at Exeter College of Art and Chelsea College of Art. She studied Art History and Theory at the University of Central England.

Solo shows include Ceri Hand Gallery; Jack Hanley New York; Maya Froderman (formerly Tayloe Piggott) Gallery, USA; Arusha Gallery, Edinburgh and London; Phoenix Exeter. She has been in numerous group shows at home and internationally. Her work can be found in The Anomie Review of Contemporary Painting (2018) and Picturing People , by Charlotte Mullins (2015).

My paintings weave together ideas about family, gender, history, folklore and politics, all overseen by a psychoanalytic eye. Restless, non-fixed, pushing and pulling, dissolving and reforming, they move between the world we ‘know’ and the less stable world of our imaginations.

My fascination is in our relationship with the image, what pictures do and why we need them.

Eleanor Moreton, November 2024

MEUS

When I first moved to the town of Wokingham in Berkshire, we lived in a new build house on a Laing estate, very like the one in Melon Party. The picture of little boys enjoying slices of melon was taken from a Ladybird book of that era. I found it arresting that there might have been a time when a birthday party for little boys included slices of melon.

The Melon Party house appears first in a dark world. It appears again, served up on a tray by the kind of mother that women in the 50s were encouraged to be.

The Red Hill is painted slightly later, when I started experimenting with unprimed canvas. The inspiration comes from the railway posters of the early 20th century, which presented an idealized version of rural England.

These paintings represent recurrent themes in my work of home, family and the pastoral. I always consider these themes as constructions; fictions up for undermining.

DOMUS

Eleanor Moreton

Oil on canvas 55 x 50 cm

The Red Hill, 2023 £3,600.00

Oil on canvas

60 x 45 cm

Eleanor Moreton Mother, 2023

Oil on canvas

60 x 40 cm

Jack Dunnett

Jack Dunnett is a painter who creates stories using placed figures that awkwardly meld and jar, framed inside scenes that appear to be staged.

Dunnett merges traditional oil painting techniques with random reactions between household chemicals, building materials and found pigments.

Working with processes that build up and strip away layers, Jack examines relationships between prescriptive mark-making and chance elements, combining structure and chaos to create imagery that holds itself in balanced tension.

The culmination is work produced on small, intimate boards that present as informative and questioning, demanding that the viewer decode each picture for a unique and personal interpretation.

Home seems to mean many things to different people.

For this body of work I am interested in the relationships between comfort and belonging; the differences between ‘coming home’ and ‘finding home’.

Depicting characters in a domestic setting, I wanted to try and represent the duality of a ‘comfort zone’. A space of reflection and introspection that is inevitably a still point from which a person looks outward upon the potential of the world.

Home begins as a place we have no choice in, yet form an unbreakable relationship with. As life moves forward, home becomes a place that we intentionally build around us. It is both the egg and the cocoon.

The degree to which the constructed home resembles the consigned home can vary wildly from person to person through chance and circumstance.

In these paintings I’ve aimed to create scenes in which characters live in spaces of conflicted comfort.

Jack Dunnett

Jack Dunnett

To Whom It May Concern, 2023

Jack Dunnett

An Author in Search of an Author, 2024

Anna Freeman Bentley

Anna Freeman Bentley (b. 1982, London, UK) received her BA from Chelsea College of Art and Design in 2004 and her MA from the Royal College of Art in London in 2010. In 2019 she participated in the artist residency at Palazzo Monti, Brescia and in 2012 the Artist in Restaurant residency at Michelinstarred restaurant Pied a Terre in London. Her work was included in the Prague Biennale 5 and Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2009. Selected exhibitions include: Anat Ebgi, LA, USA; Monica De Cardenas, Zuoz, CH; Massimo de Carlo Piece Unique, Paris, FR; Grimm Gallery, Amsterdam, NL; Lyndsey Ingram, London, UK; Frestonian Gallery, London, UK; Space K, Seoul, KR; and DENK Gallery, Los Angeles, CA. Her works are included in the Tia Collection, Santa Fe; Museum X, Beijing; Hotel Crillon, Paris; Hogan Lovells, London; and the Ahmanson Collection, Irvine. A forthcoming catalogue titled Complete Reality with essays by Jennifer Higgie and Kathryn Lloyd and an interview with Elisabetta Fabrizi will be published in January 2025 by Anomie Publishing. Freeman Bentley lives and works in London, UK.

MEUS

Anna Freeman Bentley’s practice explores the uncanny within architectural spaces, depicting interiors imbued with a heightened emotional or psychological intensity. The absence of figures enables Freeman Bentley to imply narrative, creating worlds within worlds that contain subtle signifiers revealing the artifice and complex dynamics of manmade environments. The metafictional scenes of her works in this exhibition are inspired by the artist’s visits to film sets. Freeman Bentley reveals the art and artifice of constructed image-making and the distinctions and tensions between what is created for the camera lens and the one composed by the artist’s brush. Depopulated by crew or actors, these quiet scenes hint at some recent action.

DOMUS

Anna

Study for Walls and Woodwork, 2022 £8,400.00

Oil on paper

52.5 x 46 cm

Anna Freeman Bentley

Maggie Hills

Originally from Nottingham, Maggie Hills lives and works in Glasgow. She studied Fine Art at the University of Edinburgh and has an MFA in Drawing and Painting from Edinburgh College of Art. She has received several awards including a CORE Fellowship at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, ACME’s Fire Station Residency in London, the Durham Cathedral Artist in Residency, and grants from the Arts Council and British Council. Solo exhibitions include This moment is not important but it’s all there is, A_Place Glasgow; Blunderland Optical Project, Houston; Dream as if your life depend on it Vardy Gallery, University of Sunderland; and Maggie Hills, Galerie Garanin, Berlin. Her paintings have been included in group exhibitions in the USA, Germany, and across the UK.

DOMUS MEUS

For Maggie Hills, painting is a time-based medium. She captures moments while at the same time creating durational interactions that unfold for the viewer over time, shifting with each encounter. Working from a personal archive of found images (gathered from diverse sources, including old family slides, 1970s TV detective series and social media); Hills amends, layers, and re-works these images, often repeating forms and figures between canvases so they have a shared language. She often paints onto her old paintings, and the traces of these previous images become part of the work and its history. The resulting compositions are both elusive and familiar – glimpses paused and their meaning searched for. We are inundated with images daily, and our engagement with them is increasingly fleeting… Hills repurposes the fleeting into something to reflect on.

Maggie Hills Napper, 2024

Oil on canvas 24 x 30 cm

Thinker, 2024

Oil on canvas

35 x 26 cm

Oil on canvas

25.5 x 30.5 cm

Yappers, 2023 £1,320.00

Oil on canvas

20.5 x 25.5 cm

Oil on canvas

30 x 25.5 cm

Last Cigarello, 2023 £1,890.00

Oil on canvas

35.5. x 25.5 cm

Maggie Hills

Various Ghosts, 2023

Oil on canvas

30.5 x 40 cm

Nancy Cadogan

Nancy Cadogan (b.1979) is a British American artist, celebrated for her figurative paintings with their profound engagement with literature, time, and the still moments of life.

Cadogan’s works were described as “heaven on a canvas” by the Evening Standard, and has been penned as “the new Paula Rego” . She has had solo exhibitions internationally, including at Saatchi Gallery, London in 2019 and KeatsShelley House, Rome in 2020. In 2022, she was invited as Artist in Residence at the British Ambassador’s Residence in Paris.

Her work is featured in numerous important collections. Her latest exhibition, Stanza explores twenty years of painting in Italy. Her upcoming project, The Lost Trees , explores our relationship with trees, time, and the natural world.

Oil on canvas

50 x 50 cm

Caroline Walker

Caroline Walker was born in 1982 in Dunfermline, Scotland, where she has now returned to live and work. She studied painting at Glasgow School of Art and the Royal College of Art in London, and even before graduation was recognised one of the most outstanding artists of her generation, echoing the concerns and aesthetic of some of the great artists of the last two centuries, among them Manet, Vuillard, Bonnard and Hopper, and the Impressionists Mary Cassatt and Berthe Morisot.

Recent solo exhibitions include Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles; GEM The Hague; Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh; Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge; GRIMM, Amsterdam and New York; Midland Arts Centre, Birmingham; ProjectB, Milan and Space K, Seoul. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at the Whitechapel Gallery, London; Sainsbury Centre, Norwich; Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool and Rudolfinum, Prague. Walker is represented in international collections including the British Museum; Saatchi Collection, London; The FranksSuss Collection, London; ING Bank Collection, Netherlands; Akzo Nobel Foundation, Netherlands; Kunstmuseum, The Hague; and the Kolon Group Collection, Korea. Her work was included in Phaidon’s Vitamin P3 and a monograph, Picture Window, was co-published in 2018.

Walker’s paintings, which reveal the diverse social, cultural and economic experiences of women living in contemporary society, have received significant acclaim for their aesthetic beauty and mysterious narratives. They have been exhibited at museums and galleries throughout the world and enthusiastically collected by public institutions, corporate bodies and private clients.

Drawing on her own photographic source material, Caroline Walker provides a tantalising window into the everyday lives of women of different ages, races and circumstances, who might be regarded as surrogates for the artist. Blurring the boundary between objectivity and lived experience, the artist highlights often overlooked jobs performed by women and the psychologically charged spaces they inhabit.

Encompassing locations such as Los Angeles, Palm Springs, Budapest, London and Scotland, Walker’s scenes hint at the complexity of her subjects’ lives whilst completely avoiding narrative resolution. Often exploring the notion of ‘women’s work’, the artist captures specific spaces such as pharmacies, restaurants, hotels, bakeries, perfumiers, tailoring workshops, beauty salons, laboratories, bathhouses, refugee hostels and modernist apartments.

Caroline Walker also excels as a printmaker, publishing three series of lithographs with Enitharmon Editions: Initiations (2014), Sunset (2018) and most recently Nocturnes (2023), a set of four new prints which like her latest paintings show a significant shift towards portraiture and family life. As Walker writes:

Nocturnes brings together recent family subjects touching on themes of women’s domestic labour, with night scenes which have been a recurring motif in my work for over a decade. Depicting everyday activities, from my daughter watching tv before dinner, to my mum seen washing dishes or taking the bins out late on a midsummer’s night, to the darkened space of a bedroom, lit only by the streetlights outside the window, where my sister in law, Lisa, feeds her baby. The medium of lithography offers particularly rewarding results for building up the atmosphere and rich colour needed to depict these nocturnal scenes because of the complexity of colour that can be achieved through the layering of the different plates. I’m always taken by surprise by some of the colours that are created in the process, which is so different to the way I use oil paint. It’s both exciting and challenging working out how to build up an image in this way, with just 6 or 7 colours.

Unframed Lithograph 53 x 43 cm

Caroline Walker

Unframed Lithograph 53 x 43 cm

Caroline Walker

Unframed Lithograph 53 x 43 cm

Caroline Walker

Beatrice Meoni

Beatrice Meoni (Florence, 1960) lives and works in Italy. After graduating in foreign literature, Beatrice Meoni (Florence, 1960) acquired further training by working with theatrical troupes and acclaimed stage designers that complemented her work as a scenery painter and designer for poetry, opera, and dance productions right from the start.

In recent years, she has been concentrating primarily on painting, experimenting with linguistic possibilities of painting.

Among her latest shows: Pittura italiana oggi, curated by Damiano Gullì, Triennale Milano (2023); Quadri come luoghi, curated by Davide Ferri, Palazzo Adorni, Capriolo (2023); Luce ovunque, z2o project, Rome (2022); Trattare l’aria, EXATR, XVIII Festival Internazionale delle Arti dal vivo Forlì, curated by Davide Ferri, Forlì (2022); Io dico Io - I say I, curated by Cecilia Canziani, Lara Conte and Paola Ugolini, Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Rome (2021).

DOMUS MEUS

The studio is the place where I spend most of my time. There, lots of little things and thoughts and paintings happen. During these months I’ve captured the studio’s life and its mess in my works.

Beatrice Meoni

Sedia Gialla, 2024

£575.00

Oil on panel

13 x 18 cm

Beatrice Meoni

StudioStanza Blue, 2024

£1,625.00

Oil on panel

50 x 40 cm

Beatrice Meoni

Studio, 2024 £1,085.00

Oil on panel

35 x 24.6 cm

Beatrice Meoni

Studio-tela, 2024

Oil on canvas

40 x 30 cm

Beatrice Meoni

Heidrun Rathgeb

Heidrun Rathgeb was born in 1967 in southern Germany. She studied painting in London at the Slade School of Fine Art (MFA) 1996-99 and the Byam Shaw School of Art (1993-96). After a year and a half of living and painting on Dartmoor she decided to move back to southern Germany. Since 2001 she has lived with her family in a remote farmhouse close to Lake Constance and the Alps, using two studios, one for painting and one for printmaking. From her copious sketchbooks which chronicle her environment and daily life, Heidrun develops small, intimate paintings using egg tempera on gesso panels. Heidrun has been awarded several artist residencies in Scotland (Isle of Lewis), Denmark and Norway.

A Quiet Night:

This painting shows my youngest son asleep about two years ago. The soft toy hare seems wide awake, like in a child’s imagination where stuffed animals and dolls are alive, filled with magic protective powers, especially at night when fears kick in. We once also found the bread knife under our son’s bed, questioned he said it was to fight the monsters creeping up the staircase, seeing the knife they would not dare entering his room. Where we live the nights are soundless and dark, occasionally one would hear an owl or a fox barking or a car passing by.

As all my small work A Quiet Night was painted in egg tempera on true gesso. A medium that dries instantly and unlike oil lends itself to making rapid painterly decisions and changes. I work in thin layerings of colours and often would take away more paint than I put on. The quilted blanket it a reoccurring theme in my work, initially inspired by Paul Klee and his paintings of multicoloured squares. It is about the sound of colours together, each colour has to relate to the others. I felt they made a‚ sound‘ like an allover, hum‘ together. This is how I paint — I listen to the colours’.

Heidrun Rathgeb

Egg tempera on gesso panel

17.5 x 14 cm

The Dortmund Fan Asleep, 2023

£8,880.00

Egg tempera on gesso panel

70 x 50 cm

Heidrun Rathgeb

panel

Looking at You, Paula, 2022 £3,120.00 inc VAT

Egg tempera on gesso

18 x 24 cm

108. Kiln Green, 2021

Egg tempera on gesso panel

17.5 x 14 cm

Heidrun Rathgeb

Egg tempera on gesso panel 24 x 18 cm

30. Warming Up, Fjordruta, 2023

£2,200.00

Egg tempera on gesso panel

17.5 x 14 cm

Pansies on a Doily, 2024

£2,000.00 inc VAT

Heidrun Rathgeb

Egg tempera on linen on alder wood 11 x 16 cm

Martha Cooke

Born in 2000, Martha Cooke is a painter from Bournemouth, currently living in Leeds, West Yorkshire. Having graduated from a Fine Art MA from The University of Edinburgh in 2023, she was awarded the John Kinross Scholarship from the Royal Scottish Academy, and completed her three month residency in Florence the same year. Specialising in explorations of human nature and sensibilities of the psyche, this recent placement enriched her ventures of capturing private moments of vulnerability of figures, often exploring familial relations and their natural environment as a reflection and narration of their interiority.

Whilst her naturalistic style facilitates a disarming familiarity for the viewer and allows for an immediacy in perceiving such scenes, her research involving the interplay of colour pallets, composition and lighting enable her work to extend beyond a two-dimensional illusion, installing a visceral realism to the representation of otherwise intangible emotionality that evokes a reaction from the viewer.

DOMUS MEUS

This series of work was part of an exploration into the conditions and effects of isolation on a person’s mental and physical state in connection with the concept of home and interiority. Whilst an interior space such as that depicted in these paintings can be a space of sanctuary for many, it can reinforce a notion of estrangement for others - the tension between which is explored in these pieces. Informed by prevalent feelings in the climate throughout 2020, the work aims to offer an intermediate space for the viewer to relate to and hopefully feel less alone.

Martha Cooke

Acrylic paint on canvas

15 x 15 cm

Laundry Day, 2020

Acrylic paint on canvas 20 x 50 cm

Martha Cooke

Studio,

Acrylic paint on canvas

60 x 80 cm

Marilyn Hallam

Marilyn Hallam was born in Yorkshire in 1947. She studied fine art at the University of Reading where she met and married the painter Clyde Hopkins. She lives and works in south east London and St Leonards-on-Sea and has a space in the APT Studios in Deptford. Through a career spanning five decades, Marilyn Hallam has consistently produced thoughtful, intelligent painting, sourcing the luminosity and touch of Matisse and Bonnard and the collaged construction of more contemporary painters.

I have always admired and been fascinated by the intricate, slow way that Marilyn builds her paintings. Looking in on her various studios over the years I marvel at the layers of drawing, tracing and photocopying, the collaging and reconstruction that goes on. This exploratory work accumulates and is sifted through, well before she begins to paint on canvas. That is what intrigues me - how her search leads to resolution, her preparation to realisation. The completed paintings are airy, with light flowing through them, and for all their complexity they are vividly direct, immediately radiant.

MEUS

Going into the studio, I could wish that, after all these years, I had a system or failsafe mechanism that would allow me to execute daily portions of work in a finite and cumulative manner. However … I am always glad that I do not have this safety-net, though I am slow and timid without it.

Marilyn Hallam 1998

At a time when the visual arts can seem dominated by populism and the cult of personality, it is startling to find an artist talking about her work with such naked honesty. This determined rejection of a reliance on habituation or a repertoire of manners, is likewise true of the work itself. One consequence is that each painting comes as a surprise, each with its own resolution of convincing pictorial identity. Another is that, despite Hallam’s doubts, the continuity which unifies this oeuvre has the strength of a steel cable, marked by a series of works of impressive conviction.