A_Place Gallery is delighted to present Out of Hours, a solo exhibition by Amelia Barratt.
Amelia Barratt’s paintings are quintessentially abstract, but they always begin with reality in its ordinariness and mundanity. The artist’s starting subjects are the detritus of construction yards, vehicles, the broken textures of the built environment, machinery. The thousand granular visual stimuli happened upon during any walk through an urban area. From this collection of images, the paintings begin to take shape, enter into a life of their own through the application of the artist’s eye in line, shape and colour. The decisions to lay the paint thickly, or to wash, to load the brush unmixed, to scumble in dry, to wipe, scratch or apply oil bar, to allow the ground to appear uninterrupted or to layer in sections of colour - Barratt calls to attention and lays bare the essential life of a painting. Like a magician telling you how the trick is done, only to surprise you with a more baffling illusion, her work seems to simultaneously show the viewer every component part and at the same time, assert the painting’s mystery and strangeness.
Despite or perhaps even because of their abstract nature, the paintings feel like they occupy a very real world, embarking on a form of world-building that the best fiction elicits. The compositions and forms suggesting everything from sci-fi beasties to the history of still-life painting, the zoomed-in/cropped/microscopic, or entire architectural outlines. Out of Hours could be a setting in which this drama plays out, Barratt’s unexpected colour combinations creating the feeling of the clinical, the medical. The studio is the waiting room, the works born out of the hours the artist spends with them, seeing to the patients (paintings) in turn for their various symptoms to be diagnosed, resolved - or not. The painter never clocks off from this process of looking, thinking; compositions and subjects are always presenting themselves as surprises - Barratt has spoken of paintings occupying the mind long into the night.
In a recent interview, Barratt remarked the “parallel between abstraction and fiction is very interesting to me”.* (As well as a painter, Barratt is a writer and performer of texts, though the two aspects of her practice remain distinct.) Importantly, fictions or abstractions are not lies, but rather the result of a process of transformation; in Barratt’s case, beginning with a kind of bare-faced reality and allowing the painting to play its own visual game. In this process, Barratt opens up the language of painting itself. At this point, it is common enough for paintings to interrogate themselves and their own material nature, but there is always the danger of falling off into solipsism and we can wonder where in the discussion ‘painting’ actually went. Barratt manages to walk that precipitous line with a casual ease, asking the pertinent questions along the way, and in the end offering us compelling works that simply state, “here it is.”
Amelia Barratt (b. 1989, Reading, UK) lives and works in Glasgow, Scotland and works with painting, writing and performance. Barratt received a BA in Painting & Printmaking from Glasgow School of Art in 2011 and received an MFA from Slade School of Art in 2016.
Recent solo exhibitions include: Cut Wire, William Hine, London (2024); Cool Ground, Boardroom Committee Room, Glasgow (2024); Librarian, Drawing Room, London (2021).
Selected group exhibitions and performances include: Loose Talk: Spatial Playback, Institute of Contemporary Art, London (2025); The Seasons Reverse, 36 Washington Street, Glasgow (2024); Drawing Biennial 2024, Drawing Room, London (2024); An Entertainment (live with Christian Flamm), Charles Asprey Tyers Street, London (2023); Tableau,Outlier, Glasgow (2023); Readings from Real Life, David Dale, Glasgow (2022); OUT NOW, Uferhallen, Berlin (2021); Drawing Biennial 2021, Drawing Room, London (2021); Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana (with Dickon Drury), Kendall Koppe, Glasgow (2021); Performance for Gabriella Boyd: For days, Seventeen, London (2020); Alvaro Barrington: Artists I Steal From, Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, London (2019); Museum Lates: Night Council Radio, The Museum of London, London (2018); Tall Tales From An Artist-Led Space, Cubitt Gallery, London (2018); Performance for Glasgow International, The Old Hairdressers, Glasgow (2018); To write, to publish, to speak, to move, CCA, Glasgow (2017); This can only be thought of as a monologue within a dialogue, ECA, Edinburgh (2017); All Day Breakfast: Selected Works on Paper for Reading International (2017).
Residencies include: Villa Lena Residency, Palaia (2022); Annotations II Residency, Drawing Room, London (2020).
Awards include: Stanbury Scholarship (2016); UCL Arts & Humanities Dean’s List (2016); Alfred W Rich Scholarship (2015).
In 2025, Barratt collaborated with Bryan Ferry to release the album Loose Talk (Dene Jesmond Records); Barratt is the author of Real Life (published by Charles Asprey, 2022), a collection of performance texts published in print and audio. In 2023 an audio collaboration with the artist Christian Flamm, An Entertainment, was released on cassette (Studio Scilla).
Nightstand, 2025, 50 x 45 cm, oil on canvas
Boiler, 2025, 30 x 25 cm, oil on canvas
Plant, 2025, 45 x 35 cm, oil on canvas
Gear Shift, 2025, 35 x 30 cm, oil on canvas
Moth, 2025, 55 x 45 cm, oil on canvas
Creak, 2025, 30 x 25 cm, oil on canvas