Alexandra Baraitser
Tiderip is pleased to present I Just Gotta Do It, Alexandra Baraitser’s first solo exhibition at a commercial gallery since 2007. Bringing together a new body of paintings with an earlier work from 2007, the exhibition revisits the designed objects and interiors that have occupied Baraitser’s practice for more than three decades, tracing the changing relationships between design, photography and painting.
Three paintings of typewriters open the exhibition. Once embedded in the routines of everyday life, the typewriter has become an obsolete device whose form remains recognisable even as its function recedes from contemporary experience. For Baraitser, it also belongs to the material and visual culture through which she grew up, carrying a form of memory that is both generational and personal. Enlarged and removed from their everyday settings, the machines shift from functional objects into arrangements of form, surface and colour, drawing attention to the ambiguity between an object, its design and its painted image.
Designed furniture, and chairs in particular, has recurred throughout Baraitser’s work since the early 2000s. Her engagement with these objects extends beyond their histories of design. Different chairs suggest distinct personalities, allowing them to operate as both objects of observation and forms of personal projection. In several works, furniture is isolated within darkened, theatrical settings, acquiring an almost performative presence.
The exhibition brings these longstanding concerns into dialogue across time. A black sofa painted in 2006 is presented alongside recent paintings of furniture, including a work that returns to an image Baraitser first explored in 2001. Rather than reproducing an earlier painting, this return considers how a familiar subject can be encountered differently from another point in an artist’s life. Objects recur throughout Baraitser’s practice not as fixed motifs, but as subjects whose pictorial possibilities remain open.
The means through which Baraitser encounters these subjects have also evolved. Earlier source images were physically collected from magazines and newspapers; later, camera phones enabled images from books, design publications and everyday surroundings to be gathered almost instantly. Over the past decade, her attention has expanded from singular objects towards interiors, architecture and exterior environments. More recently, digital image manipulation has allowed colours to be altered before painting begins, transforming otherwise recognisable spaces into environments that move between familiarity and estrangement.
These developments accompany a broader shift within Baraitser’s painting. Earlier works were constructed through an almost surgical precision, with colour, line and edge tightly controlled. In recent paintings, firm contours increasingly give way to visible brushwork, while colour is allowed to depart from its photographic source. Design provides the object and its formal logic; photography frames and mediates its image; painting increasingly asserts its own conditions. Precision remains present, but now exists alongside a greater willingness to let colour, surface and gesture disrupt the image from which a painting begins.
I Just Gotta Do It takes its title from the persistent impulse underlying these shifts. Across works separated by two decades, return does not mean repetition. The objects remain, while the eye returning to them, the technologies through which they are encountered and the possibilities of painting continue to change. What persists is the need to look again.
“I’ve just got to do it, and I sort of feel better after I have.”
