Artists: Michael Stubbs, Ken Turner, Julian Wakelin.
In an age dominated by digital immediacy and visual saturation, abstract painting remains defiantly slow, material, and contemplative. Thinking in Paint, curated by Ken Turner, brings together three artists, Michael Stubbs, Julian Wakelin, and Turner himself who treat abstraction not as historical echo or aesthetic trend, but as a vital language of enquiry and visual exploration. Each engages painting as a form of thinking: through surface, overlaying colour, mark and time.
This exhibition is grounded in a re-imagining of the lineage of abstraction, one that stretches from Joseph Mallord William Turner’s atmospheric dissolutions to Paul Cézanne’s insistence that a painter “thinks in paint,” and continues through the emotionally charged modernism of artists like Mark Rothko, Joan Mitchell, and Willem de Kooning. But unlike the canonised abstraction often celebrated through markets and mega-collectors, these artists suggest a quieter and critically calculated take on the tradition which evolves not in auction rooms, but in studios, conversations, and independent spaces like Tension.
In this spirit, Thinking in Paint proposes abstraction not solely as decorative, detached, or historically fixed, but as an ongoing act of attention and inquiry. These are works that do not offer clear answers, but an open and ambiguous arena of possibility through the tactile experience of seeing. They remind us that to paint abstractly is still, fundamentally, to think through the body, to make thought visible, and to assert the value of presence in a distracted, screen world.
Michael Stubbs creates luminous, gestural works that explore abstraction as sensory territory. His paintings hover between structure and dissolution, memory and immediacy, inviting viewers into a meditative, affective space. Stubbs’ surfaces reveal painting as duration, a process of uncovering and becoming.
Ken Turner brings a process-driven sensibility to abstraction. His paintings balance spontaneity and structure, layering, gesture, erasure, and intuitive form. They function as visual thought, acts of searching rather than statements of arrival. As curator and founder of Tension, Turner also fosters space for abstraction outside commercial hierarchies.
Julian Wakelin’s approach is more minimal and contemplative. Working with shape, colour, and texture he constructs subtle, formally precise paintings that unfold slowly and reward sustained looking. His work resists spectacle, instead proposing abstraction as a mode of presence which is at once attentive, quiet, and exacting.
