Ingleby’s exhibition programme for 2027 begins with a two-person exhibition by London-based artists David Batchelor and Lubna Chowdhary. Two artists whose different approaches to abstraction share a fascination with the possibilities of colour, surface and form, and the physicality of their chosen materials. Moving between painting and sculpture, both artists enjoy a hands-on approach, exploring the balance and slippage between two and three dimensions, investigating a visual language steeped in the every day, and transforming humble materials into something new and compelling.
Lubna Chowdhary has developed a distinctive visual language that explores the intersection of diverse aesthetic traditions and cultural histories. For this exhibition Chowdhary will create a new series of ceramics in densely coloured glazes presented on shelves under the title ‘Certain Times’. These elements muster like architectural fragments or musical notes – some huddling together and others bouncing off each other in exuberant combinations of colour and form which suggest a kind of collecting instinct, as well as delight in the possibilities of colour and surface.
David Batchelor also enjoys the process of gathering and arranging objects, and like Chowdhary often uses the platform of a small shelf as a method of presentation. For this exhibition a new series of sculptures are joined by paintings and tapestries in a continuing investigation into colour first defined over twenty years ago in his celebrated book ‘Chromophobia’ – an approach which celebrates ideas of colour found in the world, in urban as much as natural environments, while questioning the hierarchies that have historically separated colour from seriousness, and the decorative from the intellectual.
A new title, ‘Chromocopia’, which will be published at the end of the exhibition, has been conceived as a companion to Chromophobia, and presents a provocative meditation on the meanings we attach to ideas of colour, both as an abstract idea and specifically to the histories, associations and contradictions of individual colours. Across chapters devoted to reds, yellows, blues, greens, blacks, whites and greys, he draws on an extraordinary range of artists, writers, philosophers, architects and musicians to show how colour has been understood, celebrated, feared and contested.
