Alix Hunter

Throughout her years exhibiting with Michael Reid, Alix Hunter has drawn from a personal library of small objects, vessels, fruits and flowers, depicting them with a characteristic simplicity and restraint. Following Giorgio Morandi’s discipline, she has developed a vocabulary of recurring forms, returning to them across a growing body of work and finding, through subtle shifts in arrangement, light and tone, new possibilities within the familiar.

Like Morandi, hers is a creative exercise in variation: how much can be changed and ‘seen again’ with the same beautifully austere tools, repurposed and rearranged, like a musical composition performed over the ages.

“I am interested in sustained looking and repetition,” says the artist. “It is a kind of dialogue of stillness and movement, intimacy, and isolation.”

The seven new paintings that form this mini release, all oil on linen, each inhabit a painted interior that feels almost hermetically sealed, cast in a soft, diffuse light, like something half-recalled or a reverie. “I’m looking at softening edges, deepening shadows, density and translucency, bouncing colour and reflection,” she says.

Still life has its roots in the vanitas tradition, historically addressing the fleeting nature of life and the impossibility of avoiding the passage of time. In Hunter’s work, this concern with evanescence remains, but time appears deliberately slowed, as though frozen in amber and held within a contemplative, almost monastic state of abeyance.

With the exception of the tabletops they rest upon, there is nothing else. No objects flank Hunter’s chosen few; there is no surrounding context to make them bigger or give them particularly grand significance. They take centre stage as though they are noble portraits.

There is something deliberate in this act: removing unadorned, utilitarian objects from invisibility and giving them visibility on the canvas. Hunter’s treatment of light is central to this transformation, locating entire textural worlds within shadowed portions and the downy surfaces of her fruits.

“I consider light as part of the whole, playing with the ways it defines form, solidity, and fragility.”