Karolina Albricht – interview: ‘I was fascinated by how an image plays on different levels: an image that describes something, and an image that can transcend, perhaps, and provide access to the divine’

Albricht discusses her ambitious multi-part painting inspired by the Eastern European tradition of Icon painting

Unreal City is the first time Albricht has exhibited a work such as Lofty Branches Would Spread Here and There (2024), in which six small panels are connected to a large central canvas. Inspired by the Icon painting of her native Poland, it is the result of a two-year process of thought and experimentation, Albricht also discusses her training as a realist painter and why she does not believe in a meaningful distinction between abstract and figurative painting. She sees painting as able to “convey my relationship to the world and my relationship to life”.

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.

Karolina Albricht, Lofty Branches Would Spread Here and There, 2024. 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.