Artists: Nour Malas - May Cockcroft - Sarah Martin-Nuss

Victoria Miro presents the work of three emerging abstract painters whose distinct practices transform colour and material into evocative visual languages.

Concerned with the changing states of matter, the ancient practice of alchemy was always closely tied to artistic practice. The exhibition title, Alchemies, references this human participation in nature’s transformations, presenting three artists in whose work we see a fresh approach to material, perception and form. For May Cockcroft, a Cornish artist based in London, it is the ancient landform and rugged coastline of her native Cornwall that inspires the striking physicality of her compositions. Working with construction and fine art materials, she incorporates plaster, chalk, marble dust and charcoal into the paint, building layers and then excavating the surface. In a process that is both concealing and revealing, her paintings reference the deep alchemy of geology, evoking landscapes that shift over time, redolent of place as a site of memory. Nour Malas, a Syrian-Canadian artist currently living in New York, draws on personal and collective history to create emotionally charged, richly coloured canvases that collapse past and present narratives. Her practice is rooted in an intuitive and expressive approach to mark-making, building up multiple, turbulent layers of colour within which barely perceptible figures occasionally emerge from a vortex of paint. Her ostensibly abstract paintings become spaces that allow her to explore issues around identity, the extraction of memory and our perennial search for safety. Sarah Martin-Nuss is a New York-based interdisciplinary artist working across painting, performance and sound. Her practice explores notions of flux, emergence and transformation, whether relating to biological systems, post-humanist philosophy or the rhythms and interconnectedness of our natural world. Working on multiple paintings at one time, Martin-Nuss builds layers of oil and pastel marks that ebb and flow across the canvas. These animated surfaces seem to shape-shift before our eyes; colours grow and intensify, only to retreat and recede like sound waves. Light appears to dissolve and dissipate forms, and with no fixed vantage point, the viewer is engulfed by these painterly visions.