Peter Davies + Mary Ramsden: Kind of...

5 Jun-26 Jul 2025

Overview

The Approach is pleased to present Kind of... an exhibition of new paintings by Peter Davies and Mary Ramsden. The exhibition underscores the influence of collaboration, dialogue and friendship in the evolution of both artists' approaches to abstraction, colour and form.

Mary on Peter:

There is something curiously beautiful about the idea of folding the particularities of a still life into a systematic grid; the desire to create a structure around a subject that speaks to the inevitability of material decay.

It could be reassuring for Peter to gently organise these natural forms or to try to find a geometrical coding within this organic matter in a pictorial space. Then, inside of this predetermined framework, a sensitive handling of paint which ordinarily behaves as a fluid liquid but here is neatly willed into the constraints of the squares. Even the hard lead is encouraged to soften and twist in the pencil lines. All of this maybe suggests a desire for a kind of alchemy or attention to the possibility of a thing changing states. There also seems to be an endeavour to blur art historical thresholds, like inviting Edouard Manet and Agnes Martin to sit at the same table and have a chat.

Peter on Mary:

Mary makes the paintings I really want to make. She has done that repeatedly, always surprising me. I have seen all her London exhibitions since she was at the Royal Academy Schools. I am always struck by her ingenuity and courage through the changes in direction she has made whilst maintaining a consistent determination.

We’ve become friends more recently, and in making this show I have got to know her more. We initially bonded over our love of painting and our experience of the inefficiency of language, observing the way in which people struggle to talk about abstract painting.

I find it curious how we perceive other artists whose work we admire before knowing them as people. I’m not sure where “painting” as in the bigger picture is now, and what that means is subjective but it continues to fascinate me. Mostly by the surprises I get from what other artists make or the genres that are reinvigorated. I see Mary as an intellectual painter making work through intuition. A few years ago she contacted me after I wrote a text for a previous show. I was trying to work out how to have emotion in my paintings in the face of the constraints I felt from my education. She said she could relate. In the personal and friendly way she allowed me to understand her paintings emotionally, it enabled me to think differently about painting per se.

My education had a big impact on me as an artist. As does teaching and learning from students. Being taught by Michael Craig-Martin and Amikam Toren continues in my head. At school I had an extraordinary teacher called Mark Cheverton. Had I not met him I wouldn’t have gone to art school. He left the school when I did and with his wife Lottie, who was equally inspiring, set up Leith School of Art in Edinburgh. Tragically a few years later they died in a car accident. It had a huge impact on me. In planning this show I discovered they were Mary’s aunt and uncle. The day of the initial private view for this show, 23 April, would have been Mark’s birthday.

Artists