We are delighted to be participating once again in Artsy’s upcoming Foundations 2026 online fair. This year’s presentation will feature works by gallery artists Michael Craik, Nicholas Lees, Anna Somerville and Molly Thomson.
Michael Craik’s practice explores the interplay of colour and repetition as a method of producing quiet, meditative work concerned with colour, material quality and process. Craik creates paintings by repeatedly applying paint and removing it again. This process of reduction features throughout his work, alluding to forces of erosion that form our landscape. He allows the elemental qualities of the paint to determine the appearance of each work, creating contemplative, minimal paintings.
The focus of these works often lies at the edges, where sanding reveals strata of paint, exposing layers of alternating colour that have been built up by brushing, pouring or spreading. In this sense, his work shares a relationship with geology, to the laying down and erosion of rock.
Nicholas Lees’ work explores perception, and he is interested in the ephemerality and uncertainty of perception. Visual experience of reality is understood as conditional upon relationships of light, space, and body. This body of work originates in an attempt to manifest qualities of shadows as representations of the hinterland between two and three dimensions, and between presence and absence, thereby creating a material penumbra.
Lees’ focuses on an exploration of the vessel as an abstract form, considering the relationship between the space that is contained and the space that is occupied. These ideas are further informed by a lifetime of observing the same stretch of Scottish coastline, leading to the realisation that the constant shifts of tide, weather, and light render perception inherently transient.
Anna Somerville works intuitively, creating expressive, painterly landscapes that conjure hazy memories of places she has visited. Passionate about paint, mark-making, and colour, she builds up layers of thick impasto, delicate glazes, and finely worked details. Her surfaces are scratched, reworked, scrubbed back, and scribbled over on canvas, linen, and paper. Through this process, she creates open expanses of space and light within her compositions, inviting the viewer to delve between the layers of paint and reflect on their own memories.
Working predominantly on wooden panels and linen surfaces, she embraces the materiality of each ground, drawing on a painterly sensibility informed as much by the history and language of painting as by what she refers to as ‘found paintings’ — surfaces weathered over time, revealing accidental painterly compositions.
Molly Thomson’s painting-objects are developed through a process of cutting, disassembling and reassembling. Whether the starting point is a single panel or multiple components, she begins with basic rules, only then to break them in order to de-stabilise the thought process and provoke uncertainty. The resulting work can seem part-rational and part the product of play.
Modestly scaled and light in touch though the work is, it is the physical body of the painting that interests her - its structure, its painterly facade, its recesses. Even its behaviour. In all the work, final points of arrival are not predetermined, and despite the recurring internal geometries, the identity of each piece has evolved through its own history of moves and countermoves.
