Mirror City, the upcoming group exhibition in JGM Gallery in London, the UK, curated by Sam Cornish, gathers nine contemporary artists whose practices traverse memory, sensation, and imagination. The lineup—Dominic Beattie, John Bunker, John Gibbons, Alexis Harding, John Hoyland, Mali Morris, Lucienne O’Mara, Jacqueline Poncelet, and Katie Pratt—invites visitors to inhabit a space where the empirical world and its imaginative reconstruction meet.
A shared thread among the artists is an interest in process as a generator of meaning. From preliminary gestures to the finished surface, each artist reveals how pace, direction, and emphasis shape not only form but resonance. This sense of making as a living inquiry aligns with the exhibition’s title, inspired by Janet Frame’s The Envoy from Mirror City: a metaphorical city where lived experience is paused, reflected upon, and then transformed into narrative and painting.
Dominic Beattie. Beattie’s canvases extend a vocabulary of pure color and elemental form that invites sustained looking. His work often operates at the edge of perceptual shift, where color fields and geometry produce a quiet tension—an atmosphere that seems to hover between assertion and ambiguity. In Mirror City, Beattie’s paintings may function as contemplative waypoints, inviting viewers to trace shifts in tone and surface as if charting a personal interior landscape.
John Bunker. Bunker’s practice engages with materiality and surface history, often balancing facture with contemporary abstraction. His works suggest a dialogue between memory and present perception, where residue and gesture coexist. In this exhibition, Bunker’s pieces offer a tactile, almost palimpsest-like experience, encouraging viewers to consider how layers of history shape what we can see and feel in the moment.
John Gibbons. Gibbons is known for a sculptural or painterly approach that probes architectural space and spatial memory. His work frequently contends with the tension between structure and flux, creating compositions that feel both anchored and in flux. Within Mirror City, Gibbons’ pieces might act as anchors—intervals of calm—while still offering the viewer rooms of contemplation to move through.
Alexis Harding. Harding’s paintings explore color, rhythm, and the states of perception they evoke. The artist’s interest in tempo and pattern yields works that pulse with energy yet retain a quiet, meditative core. In the Mirror City context, Harding’s canvases could read as sonic-visual maps, where repeating motifs signal memory traces and the emergence of unexpected associations.
John Hoyland. Hoyland’s legacy as a color-centric painter of bold, expansive fields continues to resonate. His engagement with abstraction as a vehicle for emotion and spiritual inquiry aligns perfectly with Mirror City’s aim to translate experience into perceptible form. Hoyland’s presence in the exhibition affirms a lineage of modernist inquiry into color, scale, and the directness of paint.
Mali Morris. Morris’s work is known for its ethereal luminosity and subtle, nuanced color relationships. Her paintings often feel like quiet conversations between light and depth, inviting viewers to lean in and notice how perception shifts with the tilt of the gaze. In Mirror City, Morris’s pieces likely offer luminous spaces for reflection—moments where memory and sensation soften into air and pigment.
Lucienne O’Mara. O’Mara’s practice embraces a tactile, painterly approach with attention to texture and composition. Her work often navigates between abstraction and recognizability, crafting surfaces that reward prolonged looking. Within Mirror City, O’Mara’s paintings may serve as intimate laboratories where sensory cues are tuned and re-tuned through iterative mark-making.
Jacqueline Poncelet. Poncelet’s practice engages with the formal language of painting and its capacity to carry memory and narrative without prescriptive storytelling. Her gestures, planes, and color relations can create a sense of dialogue between the seen and the felt. In this show, Poncelet’s works may function as interlocutors—coaxing the viewer to listen to the subtle conversations between abstraction and memory.
Katie Pratt. Pratt’s paintings, described as working documents, are central to Mirror City’s inquiry into process. Her method—beginning with gestural marks that evolve through repetition and intensification—creates canvases that feel alive with an evolving logic. Prone to evoke electronic circuitry, neural mapping, and carrier waves, Pratt’s works emphasize interconnection and transmission as motifs of creation. Mateidio (2025), highlighted in the curator’s text, illustrates how a first gesture may seed a dense network of marks that reveal themselves gradually, guiding the viewer through an architecture of pattern, texture, and color.
Mirror City positions these artists in a shared, reflective space where the visible world and its imaginative transformation converge. Each practitioner contributes a unique approach to painting and form, while collectively exploring how pace, direction, and emphasis generate meaning. The exhibition invites audiences to move through not just a gallery of paintings, but a situated experience—one that mirrors the process of turning lived experience into art, the way Frame’s envoy navigates the space between fact and invention. The result is a dynamic conversation across generations of painters about sensation, memory, and the continual making of narrative through color, surface, and mark.
Photo credit: John Hoyland Estate.
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