Inside The Near Distance, the British painter’s unsettling new London exhibition where ritual, mortality, desire and dark humour collapse into one dreamlike landscape
There is always something waiting in a Lisa Ivory painting. A skeletal figure lingering at the edge of the frame. A Wildman caught between guardian and predator. A horse dressed for ritual procession. A woman suspended somewhere between ecstasy and danger. Across three decades, the British painter has built an unmistakable visual language: part folklore, part fever dream, part existential theatre.
Now, in her new solo exhibition The Near Distance at CHARLIE SMITH LONDON, Ivory expands that strange and psychologically charged universe through a new body of oil paintings developed alongside her recent sell-out releases of works on paper with CHARLIE SMITH LONDON × Project Papyrophilia.
Staged at Gramercy Park Studios in Soho, the exhibition draws viewers into what feels less like a traditional presentation of landscape painting and more like a passage through an unstable interior world. Here, forests, plains and shadowy terrains become emotional and symbolic spaces where mortality, transformation, ritual and desire quietly unfold.
“The exhibition’s title refers both to the formal structure of landscape painting and to the illusion of distance itself,” the gallery explains, “the tension between the belief that there is still time ahead and the unsettling awareness that the horizon may be nearer than imagined.”
That sense of psychological proximity pulses through every work. Figures recur across the exhibition in shifting symbolic dramas: female protagonists encounter Wildmen whose roles oscillate between protector and threat, while skeletal figures resembling Death interrupt scenes with the strange logic of allegory or fable.
Throughout The Near Distance, acts of obscure ceremony repeat themselves like fragments from a forgotten myth. “Figures wear crowns of tiny bodies and miniature skeletons, workhorses are adorned as though for ritual procession, and shepherds shapeshift between human guardian and spectral sentinel.” The effect is both archaic and deeply contemporary, as though Ivory is excavating ancient anxieties only to reveal how alive they still are.
What makes Ivory’s work so arresting is the instability she allows to remain unresolved. Her paintings resist fixed interpretation, instead holding oppositions in tension: the feral and the domesticated, tenderness and menace, devotion and abandonment. Beauty arrives entangled with unease.
There is dark humour here too, threaded subtly through the exhibition’s theatrical symbolism. Death appears not simply as terror, but as companion, observer or trickster. Bodies mutate. Animals seem to carry emotional knowledge unavailable to humans. Familiar scenes slip quietly into something uncanny.
In works such as Taking Aim (2026), Ivory distils this atmosphere into intimate scale. The painting’s compressed dimensions only intensify its psychological charge, pulling the viewer into a world where narrative feels simultaneously precise and unknowable.
“The Near Distance presents painting as a space of existential theatre in which the familiar continually gives way to something strange and unknowable.” It’s a fitting description for an artist whose work has long occupied the threshold between dream and dread.
Born in 1966, Ivory studied at Saint Martins School of Art in London, graduating with a BA Hons in Fine Art in 1988. Her work has since been exhibited internationally through solo presentations at Nino Mier Gallery in Brussels, Pamela Salisbury Gallery in New York, CZA in Milan and CHARLIE SMITH LONDON, alongside group exhibitions at Saatchi Gallery, Fabian Lang Gallery and Hastings Contemporary.
Yet despite the breadth of her career, The Near Distance feels intensely current. At a moment shaped by collective uncertainty, ecological anxiety and psychic exhaustion, Ivory’s paintings capture the sensation that something fundamental is shifting beneath the visible surface of things.
The horizon, her work suggests, may be much closer than we think.
Lisa Ivory – The Near Distance Friday 29 May – Friday 26 June 2026, Gramercy Park Studios
words Alexa Wang
