Coleman Project Space opens its 2026 programme with Inverse, a solo presentation by Katrina Blannin. The exhibition brings together new paintings, monotypes and an animation, developed by the artist during a period of experimentation last year in UAL’s Camberwell print rooms.
Works are installed in deliberate pairings and small groupings, with paintings placed alongside their printed counterparts to generate chromatic and material tensions between painted surface and printed mark. These juxtapositions operate as a single installation, producing an optical and spatial experience in which colour, structure and surface remain in active negotiation.
British and European geometric abstraction of the 1960s and 70s looms large, from Max Bill and Verena Loewensberg to Richard Paul Lohse and Kenneth and Mary Martin. But rather than revival, these histories are approached as systems to be tested, destabilised and reimagined, probing their contemporary resonance through fracture, deviation and renewed possibility.
The grid and repeated geometric forms work as historically trusted signifiers, sometimes obeying their logic, at others, unsettling it through rotation, layering and misalignment. A recurring ‘dot’ motif acts as a pointer within the image, drawing attention to spatial relationships and colour interactions inside the frame. Colour is treated as both material and agent, capable of illusion, instability and spatial depth through shifts in tone, saturation, scale and proportion. Precision is consistently offset by slippage, registering the handmade irregularities of print alongside the hard-edge language of painting.
The exhibition title refers to opposition and imbalance. Concepts of inverse proportion, where one element increases as another diminishes, become a means of unsettling the idea of a resolved or perfect composition. The approach sets logical structure against chromatic dissonance, order against glitch, producing a controlled unease that challenges the neutrality often associated with systems-based abstraction.
A short film in the Shed Space, with animation by Kevin Rowe and commissioned music by Pete Wilson, extends these concerns into time and movement. Derived from the monotypes, it explores the addition and removal of the dot motif, generating shifting patterns, fragmentations and new spatial relationships. The work proposes an inverse position on Modernist abstraction that is playful, unstable and open-ended.
Katrina Blannin lives and works in London. She completed a Painting by Practice PhD at the University of Worcester where she currently teaches, as well as on the BA Painting programme at UAL Camberwell, London. Her work has been exhibited widely in the UK and internationally, and is held in museum and private collections, including Museum Ritter, Germany.
Coleman kindly supported by Henocq Law Trust.
Coleman Project Space, 94 Webster Road, Bermondsey, London, SE16 4DF.
Preview: 20th February 6 – 8.30pm.
Exhibition: 21st February – 22nd March. Friday – Saturday 12 – 6pm
