Vigo Gallery is pleased to announce Push / Pull, a joint exhibition of new paintings by Lucienne O’Mara and Johnny Abrahams.
Push / Pull brings together two London-based artists whose practices negotiate the interplay between control and order. United by a shared understanding of the primacy of the materiality of paint, both artists’ visual languages are grounded in the repetition of forms. For O’Mara, this takes shape as a grid structure; for Abrahams, it manifests through rhythmic sequences of geometric forms. Disparate yet interconnected, these two artists balance the opposing forces of adherence to formulae versus working against and challenging these boundaries.
For O'Mara, the use of a grid emerged as a way to reconcile her relationship with perception and vision following a brain injury in 2017 that altered her ability to process visual information. Her compositions reject fixed spatial relationships, instead simultaneously presenting multiple perceptual planes. Oscillating between chaos and control, O’Mara’s gestural brushstrokes and saturated colour push against the grid’s stable structure – paint resisting its boundaries in an effort to subvert the very limitations the grid imposes.
“In some works, the grid serves as a kind of quiet order, a grounding mechanism. In others, it becomes something to break – either subtly or deliberately. So, the roles of composition and control shift from painting to painting- sometimes they’re holding the work together, other times they’re what I’m trying to escape.”
Abrahams is renowned for his monumental canvases, characterised by a minimalist vocabulary derived from musical composition. His monochromatic ‘alphabet’ is sculpted with thick, opaque oil paint creating a tactile surface that interacts with light and shadow, silhouetted against negative space. In Abraham’s new triptych, the linear forms glide across the canvases, with brief moments of contact. Order is delicately disrupted through quiet, organic variations between forms, revealing tension and drama.
"I’ve been using the same brush for every black painting since 2020, so the brush itself gets thicker and more unrecognisable as the oil paint accumulates, changing the structure of the brush, thus changing the mark on the subsequent painting and so on. Each work is somewhat like a recording of the changes that the previous painting made to the brush."
Also on view is Abrahams’ more recent series of Stack Paintings: totemic structures of coloured blocks rendered in oil stick on hessian. A careful interaction of non-complimentary hues, each layer veers between harmony and discordance.
For both Abrahams and O’Mara, structure serves as both an anchor and provocation. Repetition creates a sense of rhythm across their works, whilst deviations from repetitive patterns introduces striking dissonance. It is in these moments of departure that drama emerges. Their practices explore how the medium resists or responds to the boundaries it’s given – O'Mara dissolves the confines of her structured formats, while Abrahams investigates the expressive potential of precision and restraint.
