A monster lay drooling | Beyond the Gaze at Saatchi Gallery

I’m pretty sure that when Lisa Ivory lay awake at night as a young child, she was convinced that a monster lay drooling under her bed. Such creatures reappear in all her oil paintings: dark, shaggy beasts of vaguely humanoid form.

Ivory, Lisa, Theatre Of Cruelty, 2023, oil on panel, 20x15cm, courtesy of CHARLIE SMITH LONDON

She must have come to terms with her childhood room-mate’s existence, for the beasts of the folkloric world she creates in her art are friendly, rather than menacing; protective, rather than aggressive; gentle, rather than savage. More Maurice Sendak than the Brothers Grimm.

Her dark, delicate brush-style recalls Goya, with slight cartoonish elements of Gilray, maybe, and more than a hint of William Blake. There’s nothing to suggest the twentieth century in them, let alone the twenty-first: the vignettes she creates take place in pastoral settings; her female characters are naked, their interactions with the beast are loving, and often sexual. She explores the duality of fear and attraction, and the bestial traits lurking within every psyche.

A third figure commonly appears in her most recent canvases: a giant skeleton, interrupting the discourse between beast and human. Death has come to play. It’s powerful stuff. Ivory has recently passed into her seventh decade.

You can currently see the artist’s latest series of paintings at Saatchi Gallery, in the show Beyond the Gaze – Reclaiming the Landscape, curated by Zavier Ellis. The exhibition explores landscape painting through a contemporary female gaze. Ivory’s works are displayed alongside those of Emma Bennett, Kiera Bennett, Kirsty Harris, Dannielle Hodson, Melissa Kime and Joanna Whittle.  

Emma Bennett’s work is equally dark, equally arresting. Traditional 17th-century-style still lifes - featuring fruit, and flowers, and game, occasionally ablaze - are introduced into incongruous, gloomy settings. Beauty is fleeting, she implies: catch it while you can. These elegant memento mori converse fluently with Ivory’s smaller canvases. Meanwhile Kirsty Harris’s elegant, large-scale mushroom clouds remind us that The End might be closer than we think. It’s a fine, complex show.

Zavier Ellis will again be running SOLO CONTEMPORARY at British Art Fair 2023. One of the stands on the second floor of Saatchi will be dedicated to the work of Emma Bennett. To see Ivory’s work, you’ll have to visit the gallery before September 23, when Beyond the Gaze closes. The St Martin’s College graduate, a lecturer at City Lit, is represented by Ellis at Charlie Smith London.