Lizzie Munn – interview: ‘Composing them on a wall, rather than being held in the plane like a painting, the layers are more actual than illusionistic’

A recent graduate of the Royal Academy Schools, Lizzie Munn works between printing, painting, sculpture and installation

Munn describes the labour-intensive printing process used to make the “units of matter” that are then assembled into works such as her 2023 Blueprint (pattern i). Normally, each work is composed in relation to a specific place, and Unreal City is the first time Munn has reassembled a work after its first showing. She enjoys how the sheets of colour are subtly changed by the light and air in the new space and so seem “alive and responsive to their
surroundings”.

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.

Lizzie Munn, Blueprint (pattern i), 2023. 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. In the following three interviews, Cornish speaks to Albricht, Beattie and Munn.

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.