(i)-(ii) Untitled

Mary Ramsden’s paintings conjure poetry from deceptively simple grounds, working in a Minimalist tradition whereby subtle shifts in otherwise uniform surface, colour or form are made to sing. Included in ‘New Order II: British Art Today’ at the Saatchi Gallery in 2014, Ramsden completed these works before she graduated from the Royal Academy. Each in just two or three carefully chosen hues, they share a vertical composition of hilly, amorphous shape against a large, flat area of colour. Close attention brings rich rewards. In one painting, a crisply opaque field of aquamarine meets a more uneven area of pale, grassy green, applied thinly and drily so that the outline of a stretcher bar ghosts through the canvas beneath. In Untitled (lot 61), an acid zone of lime is fringed with more neutral graphite, whose slight translucency overlays a glimpse of what looks almost like wood grain beneath. A marriage of grey and rose pink in a third painting reveals lyrical delicacies of touch: nuanced greens and blues dapple the grey like flashes in a stormcloud; a quiet, resonant border of rust-brown haloes the whole canvas. Their apparent simplicity born of diverse mark-making and complex strategic construction, these works radiate a serene pleasure in the painterly.