Sim Smith is delighted to announce Caroline Jackson’s second solo exhibition with the gallery, Multum, opening on Thursday, February 26th, 2026. This compelling body of work investigates a new spatial language in Jackson’s practice, pushing textural and structural possibilities of paint to reimagine space and landscape. Through layered surfaces, shifting densities, and an acute sensitivity to material process, Jackson creates paintings that oscillate between physical presence and perceptual openness, inviting viewers to navigate space as something felt as much as seen.
“Working on the larger pieces for nearly a whole year has allowed me to fully explore surface, building compositions that dissolve into textural planes and re-emerge.”
– Jackson, January 2026
Rooted in an intuitive approach to surface, the work explores how paint can operate simultaneously as structure and atmosphere. Pigment is built, scraped, swamped, and suspended, producing fields that suggest geological strata, weather systems, and spatial horizons without settling into fixed representation. Landscape, here, is not depicted but constructed through touch, resistance, and rhythm.
Jackson’s practice enters into dialogue with contemporary female painters working in the UK at the moment, whose investigations into materiality and spatial ambiguity have helped redefine abstraction in recent British painting. Like these artists, her work balances intuition with control, allowing process to remain visible while maintaining a rigorous compositional intelligence.
The paintings resonate deeply within the rich tradition of British abstraction, from pioneering women artists such as Sandra Blow, Prunella Clough, and Wilhelmina Barns-Graham to Gillian Ayres whose work Jackson has been exhibited alongside on multiple occasions. These painters foregrounded bold gesture, material experimentation, and spatial complexity, expanding the possibilities of abstraction in the mid-20th century. By aligning with this lineage, Jackson’s work embraces abstraction as a dynamic language rooted in tactile process and emotional resonance, continuing a distinctly British exploration of space, texture, and form.
By situating abstraction as a site of exploration rather than resolution, this young British painter contributes to an ongoing rethinking of landscape in contemporary art. The work proposes space as something layered, unstable, and experiential, where texture becomes a language and structure a means of navigating the seen and the sensed.
