Tanya Ling: Worship Paintings

The Mayor Gallery is pleased to present Worship Paintings, a solo exhibition of new works

by Tanya Ling her second with the gallery. Comprising a series of large-scale, single-colour

Line Paintings – rendered for the first time in oil on linen – the exhibition marks a decisive

evolution in Ling’s practice, both materially and conceptually.

These paintings are not images of worship, but the result of it. Committed to a single

colour per canvas, each work is constructed through a choreography of continuous line,

drawn slowly and with resolve. What unfolds is not a pictorial event, but a durational act –

patient, rigorous, unguarded. The paintings are devotional in the truest sense: not symbolic,

but lived.

Tanya Ling (b. 1966 Calcutta, India) is a London-based artist whose career began in fashion design after graduating from Central Saint Martins in 1989. She worked in Paris before returning to London in the early '90s to co-found the gallery Bipasha Ghosh, with her husband William Ling. Her transition into visual art was marked by a 1996 exhibition in Gavin Turk’s studio and a commission for British Vogue, establishing her as one of the leading fashion illustrators of her generation. Alongside illustration, she launched a ready-to-wear collection, and by 2014, with her exhibition Lines (Alex Eagle), she began shifting away from fashion into painting and sculpture.