Notes from London

Spontaneous, lush colored paintings on canvas and paper by Ptolemy Mann were shown in an intimate space upstairs at the Union Club in Soho, London. Her works brought to mind a more optimistic and sensitive Howard Hodgkin, with their singing color juxtapositions and fluid gestural strokes. Mann has been expanding her usual practice of formal color field panels, made of dip-dyed threads woven using the Ikat method into large shimmering abstractions, adding layers of spontaneous paint. Those particular woven/paint works were not shown here, nevertheless one can enjoy Mann’s breakout energy released with relish in paint alone — after years tending with discipline to her loom. While hefty exhibitions, such as The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art, ran recently at the Barbican Art Gallery, London, with artists such as Cecilia Vicuna, Tau Lewis, and Mrinalini Mukherjee, Colour/ Light/Movement was a tiny jewel of a show, and Mann the textile artist already updating her field, here, showed us the other side of her talents.