Working with an expanded model of painting that is active within its spatial setting while still pictorially conditioned, the works for ‘Diagramming: the space of a painting, the space of a room’ at The Foundry Gallery adapt and respond to the room dimensions and architectural details of the gallery space. The room as a unit of interior space is positioned as equivalent to the space of painting, measured, inhabited, contained; from the surface expanses of walls and floor, to the mapping of recessional space and spatial enclosure, to the divisions of edges and corners and framing devices of doors and windows. In proposing an exchange between the space of a painting and the space of a room, the installed components are configured to anticipate and reciprocate the spatial and attentional alignments of a visitor. They also acknowledge some of the histories of the rooms that The Foundry Gallery occupies.

Other rooms and room structures that intersect with painting’s art history inform the approach undertaken here. Each of these references comes with a proviso for painting, and asks what it might mean to continue to be involved in the activity of painting. These include: the tactile invitation in a painted curved partition at the entrance of Eileen Grey’s 1926 E-1027 house, remembering Grey’s recalibration of modernist principles away from a dematerialisation she associated with abstract painting and towards a more sensorily responsive attitude to interior space; the moveable and opticallycharged surfaces of  El Lissitsky’s Kabinett der Abstrakten or Demonstrationsräume designed to house abstract paintings, while being critical of their pictorial limitations, leading to the activation of staging and sensory disorientation in the space of exhibition, with pictures positioned as protagonists as much as the viewers; or Alma Siedhoff-Buscher’s adaptive approach to space in her 1923 block units for a children’s room as part of the Bauhaus Haus am Horn, with this accessible modularity open to be shaped by the imagination set against a Bauhaus system that excluded female practitioners from both painting and architecture. So, the room visualised as a private space, or internalised as a space for thinking, and the room understood as a public space for interaction or presentation, also offers thoughts about space and inclusion. An interest in the social and cultural conditioning of the modes of attention that painting might prompt are also being worked out within the confines and possibilities of a room space.