This exhibition of Lancaster's new work consists of a series of large-scale oil paintings alongside collage, works on paper, and film installation. Located firmly within a tradition of figurative painting and portraiture Lancaster’s subject matter consists of images sourced from an archive of found anonymous photographs and family albums bought at charity shops, car boot sales and flea markets. Lancaster transposes these forgotten, lost or discarded moments of strangers’ lives into vivid, fluid impressions that, through their painterly application, thwart any definitive understanding of their context or history. With an immediate and adept handling of paint, Lancaster’s figures bleed into their surrounding scenes, moving towards an abstraction and ambiguity that divorces the subjects within her works from their specific identity and individuality, enabling their significance to relocate to a place of collective memory and experience that resonates with our own.
These new works by Lancaster signify a substantial shift in the development of her practice in terms of scale,
physicality, and in her rejection of sentimentality, embracing a dynamic and vigorous ambivalence as a strategy
towards an objective and searching investigation into both painting and humanity.
