On the Thick and Thin of Painting
Phillip Allen, Tom Benson, Glenn Brown, Cecilia Charlton, Martina Geccelli, Alexis Harding,
Fiona Rae, Daniel Sturgis, Hayley Tompkins
Curated by Daniel Sturgis
18 July to 19 September 2026
Exhibition Details
Conceived by the British painter Daniel Sturgis, On the Thick and Thin of Painting explores the materiality of the medium, its physical and ethereal boundaries, and the enduring subculture of abstraction.
The exhibition is framed as a visual dialogue between nine artists’ work, where the title refers to how each artist navigates the formal and conceptual densities of paint. Whether applied with full-bodied gusto, delicate slightness, or felt through its absence, the “thick and thin” of the exhibition’s title serves as a metaphor for how each artist uses an idea of paint to position their work against art history, the contemporary moment, and the belief in painting as a critical and durable medium.
Cross Lane Projects has commissioned a catalogue featuring an essay by Martin Holman to accompany the exhibition.
About the artists
Phillip Allen was born in London in 1967 where he lives and works today. He studied at Kingston University, London (1990) and the Royal College of Art, London (1992). Allen is known for paintings which incorporate distinctive impasto “brackets” and vividly atmospheric interiors. Allen is the Director and Programme Leader at Turps Education, and teaches on the MA Painting programme at the Royal College of Art.
Allen’s work is in a number of public collections including Arts Council of England, British Council Collection, Tate Collection, UK Government Art Collection.
Tom Benson was born in London in 1963. He studied at Chelsea School of Art (1983); St Martin’s School of Art (1987) and the Royal College of Art (1989). Benson’s practice is painting based but also traverses a variety of materials and media such as drawing, printmaking, bookmaking, installation, photography and curation. He often employs an open grid structure, which provides a framework for an evolving arrangement of components, including samples, colours, images and exhibition documentation.
Glenn Brown was born in Hexham in 1966 and lives and works in London and Suffolk. He studied at Norwich School of Art (1985) Bath College of Higher Education (1988) and for his MA at Goldsmiths College (1992). He is known for the use of art historical references in his paintings. Starting with reproductions from other artist’s works, Brown transforms the appropriated image by changing its colour, position and size. Brown also places sculpture as a central point of his practice. They are created by accumulating thick layers of oil paint over structures or found bronze casts. His sculptures, deliberately emphasizing the three-dimensional quality of oil brushstrokes, stand in stark contrast to his
flat paintings.
Brown’s work is held in numerous collections worldwide including Art Institute of Chicago; Arts Council of England; British Museum; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Tate Collection; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. In 2022 Brown established The Brown Collection in London, an art museum showcasing his
artwork alongside his choice of works by contemporary and historical artists. He received a CBE for his service to the arts in 2019.
Cecilia Charlton was born in Corning, New York, USA in 1985. She lives and works in Glasgow where she is undertaking a practice-based SGSAH-AHRC funded PhD at Glasgow School of Art. She previously studied painting at Hunter College, New York (2015) and the Royal College of Art, London (2018). Charlton uses historically grounded textile techniques to pursue her interests in geometry, colour and the role of the subconscious and hand made.
Charlton was shortlisted for the Brookfield Properties Craft Award (2022) and the Fulbright UK Scholarship (2015) She has received awards from Arts Council England (2024), Lithuanian Cultural Council (2025), the Jerwood Foundation (2021), and the Ellen Battel Stockel Fellowship as part of the Yale University Norfolk Residency (2014). Her work is
held in the public collections of Bowdoin College, the National Museum of Lithuania, Guy’s & St Thomas’ Foundation, London School of Economics, and the NHS/Bart’s Trust.
Martina Geccelli was born in Germany and brought up in Berlin. Having previously been resident in New York Geccelli now lives and works between London and Saint Chinian in France. She studied architecture at the University of the Arts, Berlin, and sculpture at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Her sculptures, drawings and photographs explore the
potential of nonobjective consciousness, with her work, which employs the interplay of line, shapes and colour, emphasising a return to a haptic engagement with material of sculpture and painting.
In 2013 Geccelli founded the independent artist space RaumX in London.
Alexis Harding was born in London in 1973 and lives and works in the city. He studied at Goldsmiths College (1995). Harding’s paintings are made through long durational periods combined with sudden split-second decisions and manipulations of the painting. He uses oil paint and household gloss paint, two different incompatible histories of colour to make paintings.
Harding’s work is held in numerous public collections, including Arts Council of England; Bank of Spain; Caldic Collection, Rotterdam; Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; National Museums Liverpool. He was the winner of the John Moores Prize for painting in 2004 and is the MA Fine Art course leader at the University of East London.
Fiona Rae was born in Hong Kong in 1963, living in Hong Kong, Australia and Indonesia, before coming to the UK in 1971. After completing a BA Hons in Fine Art at Goldsmiths College (1987), her paintings were included in 1988’s Freeze exhibition in London’s Docklands which launched the Young British Artists (YBAs). Constantly reinvigorating her
practice through self-imposed strategic challenges, Rae’s paintings are known for their inventive uses of colour, line, imagery and gesture, and an iconoclastic approach to subject matter and formal concerns. Fiona Rae’s work incarnates an abstract pop universe, filled with references to modern and contemporary painting, pop culture and digital
technology.
Her work is held in numerous public collections worldwide, including Albertina Museum, Vienna; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, The Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C.; Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean (Mudam) Luxembourg; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; Tate Collection. Rae was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 1991 and was elected a Royal Academician in 2002.
Daniel Sturgis was born in 1966 in London where he still lives and works. He studied at London College of Printing (1986), Camberwell College of Arts (1989) and for his MA at Goldsmiths College (1994). Sturgis’s painterly language infuses formalism’s rigorous traditions of visual intellect and craftsmanship with contemporary pop references and casual aesthetics. His work proposes new possibilities for the continued relevance and vitality of abstract painting and his off-beat geometric arrangements reinvest the optimistic and visionary qualities of modernism with a provocative and non-hierarchical aesthetic.
In 2011 he co-curated the major international exhibition The Indiscipline of Painting Tate St Ives and Warwick Art Centre (2011/12). He has curated solo exhibitions on the work of Jeremy Moon (2000), Daniel Buren (2005), John Armleder (2011), David Troostwyk (2019) and Carmengloria Morales (2024).
Hayley Tompkins was born in 1971 in Leighton Buzzard, and lives and works in Glasgow. She studied painting at Glasgow School of Art (1994) and completed an MA in Fine Art at the same institution (1998). She employs photography, painting and film to re-examine the everyday, asking us to look and look again. In her painted works she often rhythmically details and patterns various objects, from mallets and twigs to shirts, sunglasses and chairs – refreshing and energising the mundane.
Tompkins’s work is held in notable collections such as: Arts Council of England; British Council Collection; Fondazione Morra; Mercedes Benz Art Collection; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate Collection; Touchstones, Rochdale; The Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester
Image Gallery
Image Gallery features works:
Phillip Allen: Bolide Event (eye flicker version), 2026, oil & mixed media on board, 105x85cm: Flat Space Thinking (more oddities version), 2026, oil & mixed media on board, 105x85cm: Drawings, pen on paper.
Tom Benson: Spring Raiment (3), 2026, paint, aluminium components, steel pins, aluminium panel, 90x40x2cm: Within a Spectrum of Shadow (1), 2025, paint, aluminium components, steel pins, aluminium panel, 90x40x2cm: What we see, and see (1) & What we see, and see (3), 2023, Gelatin silver print, unframed: 30.5 x 20.3cm, framed: 51 x 41 x 2cm.
Glenn Brown: Morbid Fancies, 2026, oil paint on marble, 116x43x37cm.
Cecilia Charlton: By land or by sea (at an arm’s length), 2021, hand-embroidered wool yarn and acrylic paint on cotton canvas over panel with acrylic paint and gilding, 205x87cm: Varnelis [the painting of weaving], 2025, handwoven cotton and wool yarn, hand-dyed cotton yarn, 200x225cm.
Martina Geccelli: Red Line with loose end III, 2025, acrylic & gesso on paper, mounted. 50x40cm approx: Baby Blue, 2025, glazed ceramic, 55x46x38cm: Upright Twisted, 2025, glazed ceramic, 35x46x32cm approx.
Alexis Harding: Doubling (Poles), 2026, oil and gloss paint on aluminium, 62x89cm: Bunching (Ultramarine), 2026, oil and gloss paint on canvas, 50x103cm: Sunder, 2026, oil and gloss paint on canvas, 116x116cm.
Fiona Rae: Drawing (for the world, which seems to lie before us like a land of dreams), 2025, gouache and watercolour on paper, 50.4x42cm.
Daniel Sturgis: Realism (Adorned) III, 2023, acrylic on canvas, 140x140cm: Realism (Adorned) II, 2023, acrylic on canvas, 61x61cm: Realism (Adorned) I, 2023, acrylic on canvas, 35x38cm.
Hayley Tompkins: Cuff IX, Snare, 2025, acrylic on gesso panel and found object. Cuff: 10x13x6cm.
Painting: 38×30.5x3cm.
Banner Photography by Rebecca Larkin. Image Gallery by Liam Collins. All works copyright the artists.