Annice Fell: Under Matter

10 October - 6 November, 2025

Private View: Thursday, 9 October, 6-8 pm

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Matter’s Métier

An essay by Matthew James Holman

“When you go away the wind clicks around to the north. 

The painters work all day but at sundown the paint falls

Showing the black walls

The clock goes back to striking the same hour

That has no place in the years”

— W. S. Merwin, ‘When You Go Away’ (1967)

“I paint the way I do because I can keep on putting more and more things in – like drama, pain, anger, love, a figure, a horse, my ideas of space.”

— Willem de Kooning, 1960, later printed in David Sylvester, Interviews with American Artists (2001)

Annice Fell has titled her most recent series of paintings and works on paper Under Matter, a term which, in her own words, “threads these works together and encapsulates how I have been painting of late.” Often we think of “mind over matter” – a reference to strong-headed will, and an aborted possibility for the show’s title – and about how, in material-led works such as these, “matter is more important than mind because often what forms the mind as painting is a process of listening and digesting what is put on to the surface.” The definition of “matter” is classified as both a noun and a verb, meanings which provide a fascinating entry point into this series. As a noun, “matter” means “physical substance in general, as distinct from mind and spirit” as well as “a subject or situation under consideration.” We might think about the physicality of an object (its mass, its density, its existence in the world) is its “matter”. (We often think about “matter” in relation to the subject of something, as in conversation or when we might turn to a visible anxious friend and ask: “what is the matter?”) For Fell, as for all abstract painters worth their salt, the matter of the paintingmatters more than what it depicts.

As a verb, “matter” refers to the status of something as “important or significant.” In this, “matter” is not merely an object, a thing in the world, but rather holds important in relation to other things (or, indeed, thoughts or ideas or feelings). Understood through the blunt instrument of language, are paintings more like nouns or verbs? What kind of “matter”, over or under, do we find here? Are these painted works material objects in the world (yes) which are defined above all by the necessary categories of pigment, binder, canvas, and support (probably, strictly speaking), or are they doing objects that are best understood as the outcome and residue of action? The more time I spend with Fell’s paintings the more I recognise them to be paintings which came into being through a powerful physicality, a great labour of doing and re-doing. These are paintings that matter because they are interested in the form and function of their objecthood.  

As in her earlier works, Fell has continued to use decalomania, an art technique favoured by the Surrealists for its aleatory quality whereby a substance (in this case paint) is applied to a surface, then transferred to another surface by pressing or folding, and so creates a unique pattern. “The unique monoprint is applied to the linen or paper via plastic sheet (or a glass slab in the smallest paper works, Untitled and Flagged, both 2025)”, Fell reflects. “The paint is then lost, manipulated and redirected in its transfer to the surface, and this is how the painting begins.” Fell then distributes oil paint to build upon the print in a responsive way, guided by the traces of paint like a gardener adapts to soil, weather, and growth patterns, shaping the garden as it evolves, before wielding oil pastel to expand or even erase the painting during its final stages. “I want to use colours that put me in a position of discomfort: red, pinks, purples, and yellows”, Fell says: “I didn’t want to heavily rely on green, but I realised that specifically Italian Green Umber is a pigment I am drawn to because I view it as an erasure.” In Surge (2025), we can identify Italian Green Umber in the upper half of the painting which reveals itself as such, while also functioning like a palimpsest in the way we can see versions of its earlier forms. “I see it as a way of returning to the bareness of the exposed linen in small sections when it is impossible to get back to that otherwise”, an effect that can also be achieved by scraping back the surface of the canvas. In this way, Fell is perpetually called to what has been taken out of a painting, not only what remains.

“The works all contain a different moment and emotional response based on time; they capture very internal moments and within the marks and brushstrokes there has been the process of undoing what’s initially on the surface to rebuild”, Fell reflects. The outcome? “A dismantling to reconstruct.” For the Surrealists, and especially for Max Ernst, such a taking apart of the medium of painting – to rid it entirely or in part of its function as representation and so to push the picture into a state of abstraction – was not to rid it entirely of meaning. On the contrary, the artist who uses decalomania believed that they could “discover” landscapes, figures, or dreamlike imagery within them, aligning with their philosophical fascination with hidden realities. This method enabled Fell, as it enabled Ernst before her, to pursue the unexpected, the unconscious, and the automatic while, in her own words, balance “the conflicting nature of burying with each moment of consolidating the painting in front of me.” What we see in, say, the paired Treading Water (2025) paintings is the accumulation of cool blue and simmering yellow marks, which themselves emerged from aleatory encounters as Fell closes off or opens the forms which remain while, at the same time, leaving the residues or the pentimenti of earlier marks like the graffito on a street wall or the underside of the cave. In this way, Fell is and is not the master of her work.

If the atmosphere of many of Fell’s works do not much resemble the Surrealists’ phantasmagorical worlds, with their deferred objects imbued with what Freud called cathexis (the emotional and repressed energy attributed to objects, often without us realising it), they do have an extraordinary formal correspondence with the rapid handling of the Abstract Expressionists. The movement that emerged out of bohemian cold-water apartments of downtown Manhattan was much influenced by the Surrealist exiles who had moved from Paris to New York in the 1940s. It is between these traditions – of automatic painting and gestural abstraction, between European and American conceptions of modern painting and its limits – that Fell’s paintings can best be framed and contextualised. Fell is fond of a phrase by the Kyiv-born artist John Graham, who moved to New York in 1920 and became a mentor to Jackson Pollock, who spoke of “a process of abstracting thought and emotion through paint.” Here, Graham acknowledges how the abstract artist seeks to get closer to their ostensible subject by sidling away from explicit representation. This is often how it feels to encounter Fell’s pictures, especially for the first time. Her works are irresistibly responsive to the meanings of the world but those meanings are transformed from mere likeness by their medium and their matter.

In Siren (2025), for instance, with its title that oscillates between a warning sound and a seductress, we see how the layering and overlaying of forms appear to carry something over – something thought, or something felt – without ever attempting to distil what that thought or that emotion looked like. It is in this way that Fell’s work manages to feel so true to life: we do not see thoughts or feelings, only how they might register on the surface, just like we cannot see anguish but can register its presence on a friend’s brow during a moment of personal crisis. Ultimately, Fell’s métier is irrepressibly active: we see the residues of action and reaction on the canvas or on the paper, as the artist grapples with the heaviness – the marks, the matter, the parts left over – of life.