Karolina Albricht, Basil Beattie and Lizzie Munn – interviews: ‘What abstract painting means to me’

Three artists talk about the paintings they are exhibiting in the Saatchi Gallery’s Unreal City: Abstract Painting in London

Unreal City: Abstract Painting in London is a condensed survey of current painting in the city, with the half the works included completed this year. Curated by Dominic Beattie and Sam Cornish, Unreal City suggests that abstract painting is now a complex mixture of artistic languages, a palimpsest like the city itself. The three generations of artists in the exhibition – born between 1934 and 1995 – grapple with abstraction’s past in order to move it into the future, or at least make a viable, vivid, present.

The featured artists in Unreal City are Karolina Albricht, Basil Beattie, Frank Bowling, Lewis Brander, Simon Callery, Haroun Hayward, Anna Liber Lewis, Mali Morris, Lizzie Munn, Selma Parlour, Aimée Parrott, Shaan Syed, Melania Toma, Imogen Wetherell and Gary Wragg. In the following three interviews, Cornish speaks to Albricht, Beattie and Munn.

Albricht discusses her ambitious multi-part painting inspired by the Eastern European tradition of Icon painting.

Unreal City is the first time Albricht has exhibited a work such as Lofty Branches Would Spread Here and There (2024), in which six small panels are connected to a large central canvas. Inspired by the Icon painting of her native Poland, it is the result of a two-year process of thought and experimentation, Albricht also discusses her training as a realist painter and why she does not believe in a meaningful distinction between abstract and figurative painting. She sees painting as able to “convey my relationship to the world and my relationship to life”.

Karolina Albricht, Lofty Branches Would Spread Here and There, 2024. Installation view, Unreal City: Abstract Painting in London, Saatchi Gallery, London, 2024. Photo: Martin Kennedy.

Rooted in abstract painting, Basil Beattie has for many years developed a uniquely powerful vocabulary of metaphoric images.

Basil Beattie talks about his paintings’ use of bridges, tunnels or ladders, “inventions by engineers and architects that are simply built for the human body to move from one point to another”. He is committed to avoiding literal interpretations, concerned with how these structures have entered language to help describe fundamental aspects of human experience. He wonders whether his Union (2020), shown in Unreal City, should have had a question mark, implying an uncertainty as to whether the two partially anthropomorphised ladders could ever overcome the distance between them.

Basil Beattie, Union, 2020. Installation view, Unreal City: Abstract Painting in London, Saatchi Gallery, London, 2024. Photo: Martin Kennedy.

A recent graduate of the Royal Academy Schools, Lizzie Munn works between printing, painting, sculpture and installation.

Munn describes the labour-intensive printing process used to make the “units of matter” that are then assembled into works such as her 2023 Blueprint (pattern i). Normally, each work is composed in relation to a specific place, and Unreal City is the first time Munn has reassembled a work after its first showing. She enjoys how the sheets of colour are subtly changed by the light and air in the new space and so seem “alive and responsive to their surroundings”.

Lizzie Munn, Blueprint (pattern i), 2023. Installation view, Unreal City: Abstract Painting in London, Saatchi Gallery, London, 2024. Photo: Martin Kennedy.

Unreal City: Abstract Painting in London
Saatchi Gallery, London
18 October –17 November 2024

Interviews by SAM CORNISH
Filmed and edited by MARTIN KENNEDY