15 November – 20 December 2025 / The Persistence of Painting

A group exhibition featuring Jennifer Aldred, Amelia Barratt, Max Boyla, Michael Clarence, Sooun Kim, Amanda Seibæk, and Amy Winstanley.

Amelia Barratt, Flyover, 2025 Oil on Canvas 110cm x 100 x 3 cm. Photo courtesy of the artist.

15 September - 20 December 2025

Private view Friday 14 November (6-8pm)

‘The Persistence of Painting’ builds on the legacy of the benchmark exhibition  of the same title held at the Center of Contemporary Art Glasgow (CCA, Glasgow) in November 1995. That exhibition positioned painting as the medium “most central to visual art”, suggesting how with any mention of art brings to mind visions of pigment on canvas. Staged at a time of increasing technological development and new forms of mass reproduction, the sentiment of the 1995 exhibition continues to resonate today. Embracing this, ‘The Persistence of Painting’ at Patricia Fleming Gallery acts as a high decibel echo of the CCA exhibition. Specifically featuring artists from or who work in Scotland this exhibition demonstrates how, in a new post-digital age, an appreciation for tangible materials persists; how the physicality of painting can spark higher states of consciousness and an engagement with the stuff of the world, human and more than human alike. 

Amanda Seibæk’s (b.1997, Copenhagen) landscapes emerge from her wandering, be these the journeys she’s taken through nature or those she’s enters into via the written page. Her paintings are multi-form and dream-like, invitations to stop and think and vision life as it could be. Formally Seibæk captures this sense of possibility through her unique use of oil and acrylic on voile, a translucent material. As light pours through these artworks, highlights and shadows within and behind the painted plane shimmer, changing how and what we perceive to see. Recently, Seibæk has been drawn to natural phenomena, swamps, tornadoes and locust plagues. She positions these extreme happenings as places of potentiality, landscapes which allude to the turmoil of contemporary life as well as processes of emotional overcoming. 

Michael Clarence’s (b. 1979, Scotland) paintings have a satiate quality. Often working with sunset tones, across his oeuvre tear drops of colour run into one another to conjure a space for sentimental longing. With colour acting as the main driver for this contemplative feeling, Clarence’s compositions explore ideas of identity as well as experiences of place, interior and exterior landscapes. Characterising his work as figurative, the abstract porosity of Clarence’s artworks question the threshold between human being and the realms human beings inhabit, conveying how a sense of selfhood is formed through a continual pooling of experience. In this way his paintings render what is believed to be solid (identity) as something atmospheric, changeable. 

In Amy Winstanley’s (b. 1983, Dumfries, Scotland) work, colour and mark-making collaborate in a celebration of life experience. Featuring abstracted references, ranging from seed pods to literature, personal emotions to collective memories, her paintings manifest the entanglements at the heart of being alive. Here, human and non-human being-forms blur in a continual flux of multi-colour. The very action of painting is important for Winstanley. The immediate effect caused when laden brush is let loose of canvas allows her to take hold of the most tentative of sensorial life traces, refracting these as fluid forms – undone pops of reality. 

Painting is often perceived as a process of applying pigment to a support – oil on canvas. Max Boyla (b. 1991, Edinburgh, Scotland) inverts this routine way of working, creating luscious paintings from satin and other synthetic surface materials. Often dazzling, like the spots that linger on the eye after looking at the sun, his compositions recall celestial planes, spaces of limbo between the real world and that which could be. Clinging to the traditional idea that sees painting as a space of illusion, Boyla’s work handhandles this abstract space in between transforming it into something totally tangible and uniquely iridescent.

A material engagement with the urban world sits central to Amelia Barratt’s (b. 1989, Reading, UK) practice. Her paintings juxtapose a diversity of marks, shapes, lines and bold colours corralled from mundane chance encounters – the tread of a car wheel, a discarded chair, the shadow cast by a house plant. Dislocated from their original context, Barratt’s brings these elements together in an abstract manner reflecting the composite nature of the 20th and 21st centuries. Completed with a highly talkative style, Barratt’s paintings foreground how we are all connected through the most minute of life details, each actively contributing to the palimpsest we are living through. 

Driven by the experience of shifting between world-systems, Sooun Kim’s (b. 1989, Jeju, South Korea) hyper-realistic paintings originate in a practice of speculative world building – filmic world building in particular. Kim's fragmentary compositions picture the places that he has lived, the varying social histories he has come to know, as well and the manifold effects of urban mass culture. Embracing an approach of digitally inflected abstraction, Kim’s landscapes blur interior and exterior worlds. 

The space between objects and how we come to be with them sits central to Jennifer Aldred’s (b. UK) practice. Drawn to what is often overlooked, the stuff of disregarded memories or seemingly mundane detritus, Aldred’s interest lies in how her personal attractions to such things can exist differently when given a new material form; when cropped close or made claustrophobially large. On a critical level, this process of disorientation questions the stability of meaning, how ideologies of worth and value are dependent on context. A recurrent theme across Aldred’s subject matter is quotidian scrawl, the handwritten notes left on bathroom walls, the odd emoji that lingers alone in a chain of messages. In her paintings these traces of communication gain an anthropomorphic quality, speaking to viewers double, triple face.  

Artist CVs  

Jennifer Aldred (b. UK), studied at Central Saint Martins School of Art London, with an Erasmus year at Sint Lucas Antwerp, before completing her MFA at the Glasgow School of Art in 2025. 

Recent exhibitions include: Between us: Jennifer Aldred and Renata Ottati, Royal Flush, Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo (2025); Fragmented Subjectivity, curated by Otto Bonnen, Shore Gallery, Vienna (2025); Thus Hums The Worm, The Glue Factory, Glasgow (2024); Dusty, city, Glasgow (2024); Popcorn Machine, 318 Langside Rd, Glasgow (2024); flats, Outpost, Norwich (2023); StudioUS, PRIMEYARC, Great Yarmouth (2022); Brutto Boney, Assembly House, Norwich (2022); Burning the Fruit, AMP, London (2020); Did You Get My Message, Take Courage, London (2019). 

Aldred lives and works in Glasgow. 

Amelia Barratt (b. 1989, Reading, UK) studied at Glasgow School of Art and received an MFA from Slade School of Art, London. Between 2016 and 2019 she programmed the London-based performance series Oral Rinse with Martha Barratt, and in 2021 was artist in residence for the Library at Drawing Room, London.

Recent solo exhibitions include: Out Of Hours, A_Place, Glasgow (2025); Cut Wire, William Hine, London (2024); Cool Ground, Board Room Committee Room, Glasgow (2024). Performance highlights include readings at: Museum of London; Royal Academy, London; Live Art Development Agency, London; Seventeen, London; Centre for Contemporary Art, Glasgow and Esplanade, Singapore.

She is the author of Real Life (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).

Barratt lives and works in Glasgow. 

Max Boyla (b. 1991, Edinburgh, Scotland) studied at Grayʼs School of Art, Aberdeen, before completing the Postgraduate programme at The Royal Academy Schools in 2023. 

Recent solo and two person exhibitions include: The Smoke That Thunders, Tube Gallery, Palma, Spain (2024); Crying like a fire in the sun, Workplace, London, UK (2024); Slow Motion, Des Bain, London, UK (2023); Add More Fuel To Your Life, Sim Smith, London, UK (2023); Star Diminish, Patriothall Gallery, Edinburgh, UK (2019); Max Boyla, Haywood Gallery, London, UK (2018). Recent group exhibitions include: Sun Dog, Cob Gallery, London, UK (2025); 

Art For Your Oceans, Sotheby's, London, UK (2025); An Uncommon Thread, Hauser & Wirth, Somerset, UK (2025); Shake the cloud from off your brow, Sim Smith, London, UK (2025); New Contemporaries, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, UK (2025).

Boyla lives and works in London. 

Michael Clarence (b. 1979, Scotland) graduated from the Sculpture/Environmental Art programme at the Glasgow School of Art in 2007 and subsequently from the Gray’s School of Art, Aberdeen, in 2017. 

Recent solo exhibitions include: Full Catastrophe Painting, Phoenix Art Space, Brighton, UK (2024); Depending on how you paint your vegetables, Beacon Arts Centre, Greenock, UK (2023); Half Life, Detail Gallery, Edinburgh, Scotland (2023); Set in place, Glasgow Project Room, Glasgow, Scotland (2022); Where Do We Go from Here?, Aberdeen Arts Centre, Aberdeen, Scotland (2017). Select group exhibitions include: Wings of a Butterfly, Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh, Scotland (2025); Myriad: Oceans Apart, Manchester, UK (2025); Frontiers: Painting in Scotland Now, Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh, Scotland (2024); Naming The Thing, Freelands Foundation, London, UK (2024).

Clarence lives and works and works in Glasgow. 

Sooun Kim (b. 1989, Jeju, South Korea) studied classical painting at Chung-Ang University, Seoul (South Korea) and Nottingham Trent University (UK) before completing his MFA at the Glasgow School of Art in 2020.

Select presentations: (upcoming) Glasgow International Festival, Glasgow, UK (2026); Sooun Kim, NADA New York (2025); The Briggait, Glasgow, UK (2025); Bank Commissions, Outer Spaces, Glasgow, UK (2025); Glasgow International Festival, Glasgow, UK (2024); Echoes, Patricia Fleming Gallery, Glasgow, UK (2024); Ramifying Frost, Goethe-Institut, Glasgow, UK (2023).

Kim lives and works in Glasgow. 

Amanda Seibæk (b.1997, Copenhagen) currently studying at the Royal College of Art (London). She graduated from Glasgow School of Art with a BA in Painting and Printmaking in 2022.

Select solo exhibitions include: Avenues, Patricia Fleming, Glasgow (2024); NADA Miami, solo booth with Patricia Fleming (2024); Hemispheres, SWG3, Glasgow (2023); Shimmer, Galleri Norup, Copenhagen (2023). Recent group exhibitions include: Float and Sink, Arden Asbæk, Copenhagen (2025); ACS Studio Award, Gurr Johns, London (2024); Daisy Chains, In-between, Ibiza (2024); For Satin Bowerbirds, Boardroom Committee Room, Glasgow (2024); Pathways to Apricots, Outlier Gallery, Glasgow (2023); Unbaked Bread, Changing Room Gallery, London (2022).

Seibæk currently lives and works in London. 

Amy Winstanley (b. 1983, Dumfries, Scotland) is an artist based in south west Scotland. She has a MA from the Sandberg Instituut, Amsterdam (2017-19) and a BA (Hons) in Sculpture from the Edinburgh College of Art (2001-05).

Recent solo exhibitions include: Life Hum, Margot Samel, New York (2025); Focus programme, Workplace Gallery, London (2025); Homing, Ginsberg Gallery, Lima, Peru (2024); Soft Spot, A_Place gallery, Glasgow (2024); Slim Glimpses, Cample Line, Dumfriesshire (2023); Lost Hap, Margot Samel, New York (2023). Recent group exhibitions include Out of Earth, The Approach, London (2024); Opening at A_Place, Glasgow (2023); Strangers at Rongwrong, Amsterdam (2022). 

Winstanley is represented by Margot Samel, New York.

Gallery Opening Times: Wed-Sat, 12 - 5 pm

Directions: Patricia Fleming Gallery, Oxford House, 4 Oxford Lane, Glasgow, G51 9EP (Central Station 10 mins walk, Bridge St and St Enoch Subway 5 mins walk).

Access

The gallery threshold has three steps and two grab rails. An alternative front door with two low steps and temporary ramp is available at 3 Oxford Lane, please call us to use this door, someone will meet you.

We regret that there are no wheelchair-accessible toilets within the gallery. A wheelchair-accessible toilet is available at St Enoch Centre or at Central Station.