Ella Kruglyanskaya @ Tramway

Ella Kruglyanskaya’s solo show at Tramway spans 11 years of her practice. Works made before this year are mainly compositions of various sizes featuring cartoonish and dramatically curvy women, sometimes set amongst brightly bold patterns. 2016 then brings a distinct set of large paintings of photographs of urns and ornaments from reference books.

Across the work, there’s a twin interest in painterliness (drips and brushstrokes) and the possibilities of reducing the figurative to shapes, abstraction and so a flatness that gives a sense of the painting as an object. See for example Lemons and Lips, when a foreshortened thigh becomes just a blue band, or the lips and lemons that decorate the clothing of the two women. They’re painted no differently than the hands and features of their faces.

This self-aware and reflexive mode of painting becomes more pronounced in more recent works in which book pages and drawings are the subjects of large paintings. In the urns especially, there’s just as much interest but a slower reveal and reduction of noise – more empty space.

By contrast, see 2010’s Lobster Picnic when two women fall asleep under their books in the sun and bracket a lobster in the middle, with beach towel decorations of ropes and rubber rings complicating the sense of space or dimension. In this noisey and complicated rendering of flatness and form, there’s nevertheless a sense of narrative and drama among the more formal experimentation. In this way, Kruglyanskaya disturbs an easy confidence of being able to work out the status of what’s being looked at (decoration, pattern motif, representation of an object) within the context of stagey compositions.

Shown together like this, these marked changes in tone and visual syntax are as excitingly apparent as the intrigue and unpredictability of Kruglyanskaya’s technique and choices of subject matter.