Seeking Resonance: Contemporary art at Sir John Soane’s Pitzhanger Manor, Ealing

Fiona McLachlan

In recent years, contemporary art installations installed in historic houses have become more commonplace. A key motive is to develop more varied audiences as part of a wider public programme.¹ Unusually among historic houses, Sir John Soane’s own house, Pitzhanger Manor in Ealing, west London offers both a conditioned white gallery space, formed in a 1939 extension to the house that once served as Ealing Lending Library, alongside a series of ex-traordinary, characterful rooms in the house itself. As a result, the art programme has included international artists such as Anish Kapoor and Grayson Perry combined with smaller, diverse shows interspersed through the house. The context of Soane’s architecture, and particularly his play of colour, light and constructed narrative, has prompted a series of artists to respond in ways that seek a reciprocity between the art and architecture.

Miwon Kwon, a Korean curator suggests that such site-specific placing of unfixed art-work is understood as ephemeral, as ‘unrepeatable and fleeting’.² While, as noted by Hedvig Mårdh,

‘‘The historic house museum has become interesting as a creative space precisely because it is not a white cube or a museum built for art exhibitions, but is rather the home of people from the past. These characteristics open up numerous strategies for artists, scenographers, and curators’.³

Sadly, despite employing his full artistry and imagination to create a showpiece for his architectural skill, Soane’s family lived in the house for only 6 years, leaving for central London together with all of their eclectic collection of belongings and paintings in 1810. A full restoration of the house was completed in 2019 including the re-creation of Soane’s colourful and flamboyant decoration. The selection of material possessions returned to the house are inevitably edited and accrue a different, performative meaning for visitors. Artists making, or exhibiting, art in such site-specific contexts may draw on these traces of everyday life to invoke a social, political or spatial critique relevant to the setting. In the case of Pitzhanger Manor, however, it seems that the intangible qualities – optical plays with intense light and shadow– as well as interconnected spatial sequences and constructed views, stimulate artists to explore an experiential reciprocity with the architecture of the house itself.

A recent installation of paintings by Antoni Malinowski, offers an intriguing re-reading of the complex spatial qualities of the rooms and also of the paintings themselves seen in this highly charged setting. The exhibition was one of a series that make connections specifically relating to the use of light and colour in the house.

In a brightly daylit conservatory space that runs across the garden elevation, a large canvas was placed at the north end of the room. A distorted rectangle suggested a pool of light from the window, floating on the surface of the canvas. Blue intersecting lines may be interpreted almost immediately as a representation of the window astragals, the warm ochre palette sitting comfortably adjacent to the brick wall. Looking more closely, multiple over-painted and translucent layers form a ghostly, indistinct composition.

In Soane’s west-facing upstairs bedroom, a painting placed on an easel allows the viewer to simultaneously see the painting in the foreground and out through the window to the landscaped garden beyond. The abstract forms in the painting– with slanted verticals to the left and horizontal brush strokes to the right– echo the spatial relationship of close and distant views. A red canted form and thin yellow lines appear to advance, to read as akin to a frame, while the ambiguity of the softer blues and browns give depth in the pictorial space of the painting. In a further close reading, a darker oval form that anchors the eye within the formless space of the painting is suggestive of the small knob on the adjacent window shutter. Some visual connections can be attributed to the careful curation and selection of the work with an intimate understanding of the way the light works in the house, but others were unplanned, to be read and interpreted by the viewer.

At first sight it is the colour that makes direct visual connections to the rooms in which the paintings have been installed. In the Eating Room, a large pinkish buff and blue painting over the fireplace chimes with the colours in the carpet and the settees. Further resonances emerge between the pictorial space of the painting and the actual experience of the room, the way the light reacts with the pigments from different points of view creating depth and between small architectural details and shapes in the painting. Malinowski’s countless small brushstrokes create draping forms when viewed at a distance, while close up, the direction of the strokes produces a restless, oscillating effect.

Malinowski has previously made paintings embedded directly onto walls and ceilings, often in collaboration with architects. For example his work with Haworth Tompkins at the Royal Court Theatre and Bush Theatre in London, the Everyman Theatre in Liverpool, and at Coin Street Neighbourhood centre, evidence a longstanding collaborative practice.⁴ Each embedded artwork is developed responding to the architectural space in which it is sited. The conversation between art and architecture is a carefully constructed dialogue, a scripted reading of the observed space, light conditions, patterns of use and occupation. Unlike a show in a conventional white gallery space, in Malinowski’s wall and ceiling paintings, there is always a sense that the painting works in consort with the architecture, seeking a resonance with the context.

At Pitzhanger Manor by contrast, the exhibition was a temporary installation of paintings, some hung, some set on custom made easels placed in specific positions throughout the house. What is uncanny here is that the paintings were not made in response to the space, as is generally the case with his architectural interventions. The lead-in time to the show that also included photographs by Helen Binet alluding to Sir John Soane’s Grand Tour of Italy- did not allow for new work to be made by either artist. Instead a selection of paintings was made by Malinowski, together with the curator Richard Parry, from the artist’s collection, giving consideration to scale and restricted mounting conditions due to the Grade 1 listed building. Some connections, such as the colour palettes of the pieces, were consciously made, and the placing of each work is very deliberate in making suggested parallels with particular characteristics of each room. Other less predicted associations seem to occur in the mind of the viewer seeing a painting in its immediate context in the house.

The title of the exhibition, Pigments and Photons, alludes to Malinowski’s signature method of engaging and activating light within the surface of the paintings through densely arrayed marks of pigments, chosen not only for the colour they reflect, but the way the light is reflected by the microscopic surface. Moreover, the pigments are laid in layers causing further reactions and interactions in the way the light is absorbed, reflected and refracted. His large wall painting Spectral Flip (2015) at the Mathematical Institute in Oxford designed by Rafael Viñoly, was painted insitu over a period of months making the marks in response to the passage of the light. Interference pigments used as an underlay bend the light waves that fall on the surface, and react very differently to traditional subtractive earth colours such as ochre and caput mortem. In the bedroom at Pitzhanger Manor, Malinowski’s painting is placed at an angle, slightly impeding the passage of the visitor to the house and forcing an acute view. The colour appears entirely different when seen at this angle and the layers also seem to shift in the spatial hierarchy of the surface. As the curator of an early exhibition of paintings at the Gimpel Fils Gallery in London observed ‘in Malinowski’s paintings, and in life, colour does not exist so much as happen’.⁵ The interaction of light and surface– producing lustre, iridescence, translucency and fluorescence, layered with solid light-absorbing colour is not readily understood through conventional colour theory in art. The spatial effects are as restless, dynamic and complex as Soane’s own vision for the house.

Two earlier art installations at Pitzhanger Manor drew attention to Soane’s optical illusions using coloured glass and mirrors to scatter light and create a distorted spatial depth. As part of her exhibition The Lightclub of Batavia in 2024, artist Sinta Tantra placed two paintings with gold leaf overlaid on a deep, flat, Prussian blue in the red-painted drawing room either side of the fireplace. This south wall, sitting perpendicular to the large conservatory windows is flooded with light falling across the picture plane. The gold leaf shimmers in the light appearing to float. The visual and spatial effect is enhanced by the multiple reflections of the work in mirrors placed opposite each other by Soane. The title of the exhibition was taken from a short story by Paul Scheerbart and makes a subtle reference to Soane’s use of yellow glass in the central atrium at Pitzhanger, which floods the entrance and stairwell with an ethereal glow similar to the fictive bathers who are immersed in coloured light from stained glass, rather than water, in the story. In the Pigments and Photons installation, Malinowski’s paintings selected for the same position contain fragments of venetian Murano glass on the surface also drawing attention to coloured light filtered through stained glass in the adjacent rooms.

Finally, Catrin Huber’s, Grammar of Clouds, 2012, a projected installation on the ceiling of the drawing room, made a connection between her interest in fictional space and Soane’s use of a painted central oculus in the breakfast room, which suggests a space beyond the surface and heightening the experience of the small room. In Malinowski’s deep blue Almost Seen–Lapis Lazuli painting, placed directly in the breakfast room, a slanted oval form is easily read as resonating with the disc overhead. Both artworks encourage the eye to drift upwards. A wall mirror, placed by Soane strategically opposite the entrance from the hall, distorts the width of the room and introduces further spatial ambiguity. Malinowski’s shimmering blue painting is then reflected in the mirror seen from the vestibule and contrasting with the ochre walls.

Sir John Soane’s fascination with light and with shifting atmospheric effects is one of the most significant factors in the enduring appeal of his architecture. His use of colour, of specific pigments such as Herculean red, seen on his Grand Tour in south Italy, a dark greenish earth, and strong yellow both applied as pigment but also generated as light through coloured glass, are carefully choreographed to allow multiple readings of each room. Soane also understood the potential of fusing art, architecture and sculpture often as agents in an artfully constructed narrative. Malinowski’s paintings seem a perfect match for Soane. His acute understanding of colour and the interaction of light with material surface draws attention to similar dynamic and ethereal effects in the architectural composition.