Nik Macey is beguiled by paintings made of layers of sweeping brushstrokes in an unsettling rainbow palette of peach, pineapple yellow, mahogany brown, mint blue, baby pink, rich yellow ochre, sludgy green and vivid blue-violet.
Gina Kuschke’s canvases wriggle and writhe with oil paint. Huge two-metre-high symphonies of abstraction combine subtle and unusual colour pairings, applied with impassioned brushstrokes that dance across every inch of the canvas. A Place Beyond, the artist's first solo show at Alison Jacques, probes into the ever-abundant experiences of places. This is Kuschke’s embodiment of the regions that always pull her back in. In each of our minds lives an archive of our own, of locations that we spiritually inhabit, grapple with, or call home.
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| Gina Kuschke, Cool Mint Happy Valley, 2025, oil on canvas, 180 x 220 cm |
Cool Mint Happy Valley glows under the gallery lights, brilliantly intense yet subtle. The painting’s potency seems to live in the spaces between brush marks. Earthy beiges tango with fresh mint blues, both mingling with washy streaks of teal. Threads of yellow weave their way throughout the picture’s plane. Spot hints of pale baby pink within the ethereal palette.
Kuschke’s paintings aren’t strictly landscapes, but they stand firmly rooted in a sensitivity to place. Vivid feelings and memories of place anchor all the works, though they often drift away into the slippery realms of abstraction. Such places include St Ives, Cornwall, where Kuschke won a prestigious residency at Porthmeor Studios early last year, sparking the conception of this body of work, and Cape Town, South Africa, where she was born and raised and returns to yearly.
The artist has a distinctive ability to inhabit a place, to know it, to capture its energy and translate it into paint. She says that ‘at some point in the process, a scene or event jumps out at me as something that is familiar, and the responsibility then, is to capture that.’ Cornwall’s wildness—its natural tides and cycles—live within the paintings. Observed outlines from fishing boats in the sand creep into Kuschke’s mark-making. Each painting becomes an incarnation of the place; a nuclear shadow of her experience there.
Pink Atlantic fizzes with speed. A frenzy of sweeping brushstrokes, splatters of peach and pineapple yellow merge with smears of mahogany brown. It’s a palette that unsettles, morphing between citrus fruits or surrealism or the earth. Shell Flex is similarly intense, featuring rich yellow ochre in floating arches of colour, applied sometimes with long brushstrokes, sometimes short. Hints of gold and dark brown drip down. A layer of radiant, vivid blue-violet grabs our gaze and attention, drawing us in close. Standing close to the painting is essential, and fun. To let your eye unfurl the paint’s twists and turns— that is to delve into Kuschke’s magic.
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| Gina Kuschke, Shell Flex (Porthmeor), 2025, oil on canvas, 200 x 250 cm |
Early experiences of an upbringing in post-apartheid South Africa have shaped a painterly language that grows with each place Kuschke inhabits. The paintings in A Place Beyond are also the output of years of historical and literary research; Kuschke gained her undergraduate degree in art history at the Courtauld, before cutting her teeth on the painting programme at the Royal College of Art. Stacks of literature populate her painting studio. Her research and work connect her to a long thread of abstract expressionists.
Kuschke doesn’t shy away from experimentation within this body of work. In Chopped Sunrise she toys with rigidity. Almost-black lines punctuate squelchy scribbles of colour, trying to impose a sense of order to a canvas otherwise and fluid and undone. She plays a lot with colour, generating unusual combinations that excite and unnerve, although I think that in The Red Haired Dancing Girls the colour choice feels a tad garish and obvious. Three central pillars or figures shape-shift and dance, painted with erratic brushstrokes bubbling with vitality. Whilst less richly ambiguous than others, Kuschke is masterful in capturing the energy of the scene.
Painted in Porthmeor, Mother and Daughter are the only works that I read as a pair. From afar, their surfaces are flatter than others. Up close, they are dynamic and frenzied. Thick and thin sit side by side; Kuschke uses thinner washes of paint here, and when combined with smatterings of thick gestural marks the contrast is compelling. These paintings feel like feelings, turbulent thoughts, the inside of Kuschke’s head, or maybe of mine.
Layering is key. Kuschke works and works the paintings into intensity. Lived histories of each place fold into brushstrokes which create vibrant colourful tangles of chaos, felt experiences, vivid light, the rhythmic waves of the sea, and memory. Herself and the painting become interchangeable. ‘The painting is the snake’ she says, ‘and I am its shedded skin.’
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| Gina Kuschke, Westerly is Blue, 2025, oil on canvas, 250 x 200 cm |
On first glance, Westerly Is Blue could be a 1980s Joan Mitchell. It’s melodramatic. Numerous layers and blocks of colour are intensely worked with the brush, intersected by sweeping marks of rich royal blue. The painting’s dominant section is a swirling storm cloud of angry colour where sludgy green strikes baby pink and magenta. Kuschke has an instinct for paint and drama.
Aside from being wonderfully visually puzzling, Kuschke’s paintings prompt us to consider the significance of place. What spaces do we inhabit, knowingly or unknowingly? How do these memories mark us, and what can we do with them? Places are endless sources of inspiration. Kuschke has made many homes for herself on the gallery walls.
Nik Macey
A Place Beyond
Alison Jacques, London W1
1 January – 21 February 2026
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