The Secret Histories

‘The Secret Histories’ is an exhibition of two contemporary artists, Andrew McIntosh and Lesley Hilling, whose works explore how the decaying surfaces of the urban environment hide vast imaginary and emotional worlds.

Andrew McIntosh is a Scottish painter based in London who uncovers grandeur in the dilapidated and the forgotten. His surreal paintings depict run-down old buildings and weather-beaten mobile homes whose appearance belies a hidden inner magic. A large painting presents a derelict old cinema, the Regent from Deal in Kent, perched on a rocky outcrop in a Renaissance landscape like a temple dedicated to the imagination. A tired commercial building in Peckham has two walls removed to reveal two artworks in its back rooms that articulate the search for mystical experience: William Blake’s The Omnipotent upstairs, and page 363 from Tom Phillips’ Humement book below. Two accompanying paintings present mobile homes parked deep in the wilderness. These vehicles encapsulate both the intrepid spirit of adventure as well as the independent interior worlds of their inhabitants. Old graffiti on these vehicles suggest that they travel not just overland, but across time in flights of the imagination, with ancient and modern motifs referencing the value Vikings placed on wood. Andrew’s paintings look to these everyday unassuming structures as vessels for such private imaginative journeys, full of personal meaning and enchantment.

Lesley Hilling is an artist based in South London who creates sculptures using salvaged remnants of the city’s past. Old doors and windows, discarded architraves and timbers are cut apart and reworked into labyrinthine arrangements reminiscent of the cubist compositions of Braque and Picasso, as well as Mondrian’s New York paintings. Faded photographs, trinkets and toys are hidden in secret drawers and cabinets much like old reliquaries concealed the precious object from view. By working with found objects Lesley’s works also echo the poetry that Joseph Cornell’s boxes created with everyday clutter. Such objects reflect lived lives and are redolent of the passage of the years, and through them Lesley’s arrangements reflect how each person expresses their individuality through the things they come into contact with. Like city maps in three dimensions, they also suggest how the character of a city is built up from the accretion of all these different people: of how a city is an organism of interconnected lives, much like the individual is a complex web of memories and experiences. In an era of advancing homogeneity, Lesley’s sculptures reveal the lyrical beauty in the messiness of real life.