Francesca Mollett: Corso

GRIMM is pleased to present Corso, a solo exhibition of new works by London-based artist Francesca Mollett, on view at the New York gallery from 10 May to 22 June 2024. This is the artist’s second exhibition with GRIMM since joining the gallery in 2022 and her debut solo exhibition in New York. A new publication with an introduction by Bryony Bodimeade will be published to accompany the exhibition.

Mollett’s recent work is an exploration of the permeability of the painted image; the nature of her abstraction is porous, whereby representation of her subject seeps through membranous surfaces. Each canvas appears in flux, like a chemical reaction still unfolding, with the underlying image itself variously willed into or out of reach. 

Language, textual and visual, is fundamental to decoding Mollett’s surfaces. The exhibition’s title Corso hints at the multiplicity of overlapping concepts with which the artist engages. With much of the work on view gathered from recent residencies - including one in 2023 in Turin, Italy - the title Corso is taken from the Italian word that can mean either ‘street’ or ‘stream,’ highlighting the intertwining of the architectural and natural. The artist arrived in Turin not long after a flood caused sections of the river Po to overflow its banks. The often overlooked minutiae of the town were thrown into sharp relief, as tree roots, cracks in the road, fluorescent fencing and peeling barks were cast in new, reflective detail. Following her time in Italy, Mollett was later in residence in Cortachy, Scotland, looking at iridescence and lichens. Exploring the connections and disparities in each environment led to an openness when translating her observations back in her London studio, as time and space became compressed and reintegrated in her layered, painterly forms.

Phrases such as ‘in corso,’ however, can also mean ‘in progress,’ ‘happening’ or ‘current’, denoting the passage of time and finding parallels in the movement and vitality of Mollett’s handling of paint, a feeling that there is growth and change occurring as her images unfold. This sensation of growth in an organic or biological sense, too, is vital to this body of work.

Though derived from multiple, often literal sources - the observation of a landscape, city, insect or plant - the act of painting gives life to new forms that are generative, reproducing like spores and formed by (the movement of) color. A description or translation discovered in one painting engenders another painting. These are images constantly in pursuit of further forms to grow, stretch, record and bear witness.

This necessarily then implies experience as embodied. For both artist and viewer, there is a process of destabilising and re-situating or reconstituting a sense of place and time. Mollett’s work is a consideration of space through slow looking, slow feeling, of scrutinising an environment not at a distance but as a personal relationship. To view these works is to view the act of interpreting memory as recalled over a period of months, the storing and revisiting of space in the mind’s eye, making explicit the pliability and fallibility of perception. The nature of painting space and time, as with the nature of perceiving it first hand, is ultimately elusive and fragile.

Francesca Mollett (b. 1991, Bristol, UK) received her MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art, London (UK) in 2020, having previously studied at the Royal Drawing School and Wimbledon College of Art, London (UK). Recent solo exhibitions include Noon at Pond Society, Shanghai (CN); Halves at GRIMM, Amsterdam (NL) and Low Sun at Micki Meng, San Francisco, CA (US), 2023; The Moth in the Moss at Taymour Grahne Projects, London (UK), 2022; Spiral Walking at Baert Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (US), 2022 and Wild Shade at Informality Gallery, London (UK), 2021. She was included in the group exhibition The Kingfisher’s Wing, curated by Tom Morton at GRIMM, New York, NY (US), 2022. Her work has also been featured in numerous group shows including New British Abstraction, CICA, Vancouver (CA), Considering Female Abstractions, Green Family Art Foundation, Dallas, TX (US), 2023; Sabrina, curated by Russell Tovey, Sim Smith, London (UK); New Romantics, The Artist Room at Lee Eugean Gallery, Seoul (KR); Down in Albion at L.U.P.O. Lorenzelli Projects, Milan, (IT) in 2022; Le coeur encore, The approach, London (UK), 2021; Diaries of a Climate, Baert Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (US), 2021; and London Grads Now, Saatchi Gallery, London (UK), 2020.

Mollett’s work can be found in the Green Family Art Foundation, Dallas, TX (US); He Art Museum, Foshan (CN); Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL (US); K11 Art Foundation, Hong Kong (HK); Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo (NL); Kunstmuseum, The Hague (NL); Pond Society, Shanghai (CN); the Rachofsky Collection, Dallas, TX (US); The David and Indrė Roberts Collection, London (UK); Sainsbury Centre, Norwich (UK) and The University of Oxford, St Hilda’s College Art Collection, Oxford (UK), among others.