Gretchen Albrecht, Helen Calder, Noel Ivanoff, John Nixon, Jeena Shin
PAST PERFECT

The past perfect tense clarifies a sequence of events. This happened before that, or that happened before this, or by this time, that had already happened. It’s a subtle tense, quietly keeping moments in order, almost like the stretcher that keeps the canvas taut, allowing us to see the painting as it is. Taken as the title for this exhibition, a poetic double entendre comes into play: paintings from the (recent) past remain perfect today.

If we use the past perfect to describe this group of paintings, we might say that although they were produced decades ago (Gretchen Albrecht, Noel Ivanoff, John Nixon), or a decade ago (Jeena Shin, Helen Calder), they had already anticipated contemporary visual sensibilities. Drawn from five very different practices, the works in Past Perfect hold a shared interest in geometry, and the possibilities of light, transparency, deep black and shadow, and the tension between exposure and layering. 

Lucinda Bennett, April 2026