Pen Reid: Behind the Curtain

By Susan Mansfield, 30.05.2023

Pen Reid, A long Marriage, Oil on Canvas, image courtesy of the Artist and the Compass Gallery

Pen Reid: Behind the Curtain

 

The quiet but original voice of Edinburgh-born Pen Reid is revealed at Compass Gallery, in the artist’s biggest solo show yet

 

In an art world which often seems obsessed by youth, it’s a joy to see an artist flower in middle age with all the attendant skills and depth of vision. Edinburgh-born Pen Reid graduated from Oxford Brookes University in 1990 and went on to a Masters in Painting and Printmaking at the Art Institute of Chicago on an International Peace Scholarship. Now back in Edinburgh, she had her first solo exhibition at the city’s Union Gallery in 2020.

 

This is her biggest show to date, representing nearly three years’ work, and it’s a chance to appreciate her range, the various moods of her paintings: unsettling, sometimes funny, complex in the ideas they explore. Given her facility with tonality and colour and love of pattern, they are often beautiful too.

 

The title is apposite: many of these paintings feature a curtain drawn back, still others imply it. The world of these pictures is the domestic, often grounded in very specific details: the washing machine, the claw-footed bath, the pram in the hallway. The viewer might be peeking past the curtain into this world or, along with the occupants, looking out.

These complex compositions fold through indoor and outdoor space: flowers blossom on interior walls; the Milky Way floods into an upstairs landing; houses open up along one wall like doll’s houses. The paintings do this metaphorically, too, inviting us to glimpse inner worlds, private hopes, fears, fantasies.

 

Not all have people in them; sometimes their presence is oblique, shown in a photograph or glimpsed in a mirror. Animals might appear as their representatives, like the two budgerigars in ‘A Long Marriage’, but also sometimes as themselves: lambs, hummingbirds, the ‘Lost Bears’ wandering in a half-wild suburban garden.

 

What indoors and outdoors mean in a Pen Reid painting is not straightforward. The domestic is a place of nurture and growth, but outside is the realm of the imagination, wildness and freedom. There is a whiff of fairy tale in paintings such as ‘Five Lost Children’, in which the five small protagonists explore a big empty house in a forest. Sometimes, instead, there is a dash of surrealism, like the baby’s rattles growing in a garden.

 

In a painting like ‘Fresh Air’, there is a tangible sense of menace in the way the bathroom fills up with steam, but the woman in ‘Washing Up’ might only to be daydreaming a palace of the mind. There are moments of great humanity, like the head scarfed woman in ‘Wrong Footwear’ who finds herself ill-equipped for an Alpine landscape, or the woman who sits at the mirror wondering whether to dye her hair. And there’s a deep sadness (as well as a little absurdity) in ‘Empty Nest’, with its room crowded with tiny beds.

 

Mixed media works in gouache and pencil show off her drawing skills, and her feeling for paint is on show everywhere, in colours and patterns, light and shadow. She likes to work on the covers of old books, making their titles part of the story. These works are the product of a quiet but original voice, probing the boundaries of interior and exterior, real life and imagination, wildness and confinement, and how they can sometimes be more porous than we think. 

 

Pen Reid: Behind the Curtain is exhibited at Compass Gallery until 7th June  www.compassgallery.co.uk