BASIL BEATTIE
Drawing on the Interior II
24 January – 20 February 2026
Curated by Eagle Gallery for Turps Gallery, London
If we can say that there always was, or has, over time, come into being an academy of abstraction, then Beattie has used it as a foil; has, to employ another metaphor, written many chapters that have questioned and critiqued its tenets in the name of painting-after-photography. (Nick de Ville, 2025)
Drawing on the Interior II celebrates the work of Basil Beattie RA in a solo exhibition of recent drawings and paintings that are hung in relationship to three canvases from his renowned Janus series (2007–09).
Beattie is a major figure in the British avant-garde of the twenty first century and one of our most respected abstract painters. Trained in London in the late 1950s he was deeply influenced by the legacy of American Abstract Expressionism. The material substance of paint and a sense of meaning emerging out of gesture remain central aspects to his practise but much like Philip Guston developments in a career spanning 60 years have led him to a singular place. At the age of 91 he stands apart from his direct contemporaries and continues to make work that tests the metaphysical possibilities of painting.
Occupying two galleries in the Turps headquarters at Taplow House, Drawing on the Interior II recalls a seminal installation Beattie conceived for the Eagle Gallery in 1991 that brought together paintings with almost 400 drawings which bore the motifs of ladders, steps, thresholds, stacked blocks and towers. In a new essay for the current exhibition the writer Nick de Ville describes these now signature motifs as ‘the trial components of a language of built-space, a built-space discovered in the rudiments of signification’. Over the last thirty years Bettie has drawn upon this vast image-bank to express ideas about perception, memory and consciousness within his wider work.
Basil Beattie (b. 1935, West Hartlepool, UK) graduated from the Royal Academy Schools in 1961 and was elected a member of the Royal Academy of Arts in 2006. He has featured in solo exhibitions at institutions including IKON Gallery, Birmingham; Jerwood Gallery, Hastings; Middlesborough Institute of Modern Art; Royal Academy of Arts, London and TATE Britain, amongst others. Beattie is represented by Hales London and New York, who are mounting a concurrent solo exhibition Another Place, Paintings from the 90s, in their London gallery, from 29 January–28 February 2026.
A Turps Spotlight publication on Beattie’s work will be launched during the exhibition.
Turps Gallery
The Chaplin Centre
Taplow House
Thurlow Street
London SE17 2DG
(Open Thursday–Saturday, 12–6pm)
Artlyst Review of Drawing on the Interior II
Images: Above and Below series (2007). Etching and chine collé 72.5 x 57.5 cm. Published by Eagle Gallery / EMH Arts, London
