Basil Beattie – interview: ‘passageway, corridor, ladder, staircase, tunnel: they are all words I use metaphorically with regard to other human experiences’

Rooted in abstract painting, Basil Beattie has for many years developed a uniquely powerful vocabulary of metaphoric images

Basil Beattie talks about his paintings’ use of bridges, tunnels or ladders, “inventions by engineers and architects that are simply built for the human body to move from one point to another”. He is committed to avoiding literal interpretations, concerned with how these structures have entered language to help describe fundamental aspects of human experience. He wonders whether his Union (2020), shown in Unreal City, should have had a question mark, implying an uncertainty as to whether the two partially anthropomorphised ladders could ever overcome the distance between them.

Unreal City: Abstract Painting in London is a condensed survey of current painting in the city, with the half the works included completed this year. Curated by Dominic Beattie and Sam Cornish, Unreal City suggests that abstract painting is now a complex mixture of artistic languages, a palimpsest like the city itself. The three generations of artists in the exhibition – born between 1934 and 1995 – grapple with abstraction’s past in order to move it into the future, or at least make a viable, vivid, present.

Basil Beattie, Union, 2020. Installation view, Unreal City: Abstract Painting in London, Saatchi Gallery, London, 2024. Photo: Martin Kennedy.

The featured artists in Unreal City are Karolina Albricht, Basil Beattie, Frank Bowling, Lewis Brander, Simon Callery, Haroun Hayward, Anna Liber Lewis, Mali Morris, Lizzie Munn, Selma Parlour, Aimée Parrott, Shaan Syed, Melania Toma, Imogen Wetherell and Gary Wragg.

Unreal City: Abstract Painting in London
Saatchi Gallery, London
18 October –17 November 2024

Interviews by SAM CORNISH
Filmed and edited by MARTIN KENNEDY

Installation view, Unreal City: Abstract Painting in London, Saatchi Gallery, London, 2024. Photo courtesy Saatchi Gallery.