Catherine Long:After The Fire

Huxley-Parlour is pleased to present After the Fire, an exhibition of new work by London-based artist Catherine Long (b. 1982). This exhibition marks Long’s first solo show in London and her first with Huxley-Parlour. Long’s paintings propose abstraction as an embodied encounter, an experience that precedes language and registers first as bodily sensation.

Her process begins in close physical proximity: hands moving across raw canvas, calibrating scale and reach before any mark is laid down. Long then accedes to an initial colour that sets the tonal logic of each work. Rooted in the artist’s formative training in contemporary dance and ongoing somatic practice, these works treat the canvas as a choreographic field: a site activated through rhythm, gravity, and the body’s intuitive intelligence.

Working across multiple canvases simultaneously, Long builds compositions through successive sessions of improvisation and return. Marks are laid down with the urgency of gesture, mobilising the artist’s full body in relation to the canvas as an arena of space. These marks are then revised through layering, drying, observation and renewal, allowing the paintings to accumulate as records of both movement and time, of decisions made and remade.

Long’s paintings are organised by accumulation, unfolding against the possibility of erasure. She employs oil bar alongside thick painted contours to generate raised lines that are then overpainted. These drawn marks persist as residual traces, and function as a kind of internal armature – structural, sinuous, and load-bearing – around which subsequent layers accumulate. This structural persistence suggests painting as a form of memory: histories held within the surface, simultaneously concealed and present.

Long situates her practice within a broader history of painters who have described the canvas as a sensory instrument, capable of transmitting affect directly and bypassing narrative explanation. She emphasises the continuing capacity of abstraction to communicate without prescription, through what she describes as kinesthetic empathy: a physiological resonance in which looking becomes a felt experience.