Jagjit Chuhan, the new exhibition at the Victoria Gallery and Museum at Liverpool University

Art  Tonight, briefly, I attended the private view for the new exhibition at the Victoria Gallery and Museum at Liverpool University, a small retrospective of recent work by the artist Jagjit Chuhan.

Double Negative have interviewed her here.

She produces relatively abstract or impressionistic paintings of the female form filtered through preoccupations and influences as diverse as "Bacon and Manet, Indian artists like Ravinder Reddy, Marlene Dumas, Renaissance paintings" as well as Japanese art.

Much of the work is in reddish hues, though there are newer canvases which are multicoloured and almost sculptural in their layering of the paint.

Not everything is to my taste, but there are two pieces in which she applies her techniques to more conventional structures which I love.

A landscape in which a Japanese pagoda emerges after careful spectator study and a much more formal, but absolutely gorgeous portrait called Reverie, viewable here on the artist's own website.

A young woman reclines across a red coach surrounded by lilies her face enigmatic, though apparently content, happy.

Look closer and we realise she's underneath a duvet, her head across a pillow, this isn't perhaps her house, she a visitor though obviously not a strange.

Like the best portraits we're drawn in, we wonder and our mind wanders, so although it's perhaps the most formally obvious of the works in the exhibition, it's as complex as all the others.

Who is she?

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