TERSE

TERSE

Inspection Pit’s new group exhibition brings together diverse works from six painters. By highlighting their intentional use of bold and abrupt visual language, the show examines the role and impact of this strategy in contemporary painting.

Private view: Friday 7 November, 6-9 pm
8 November 2025 - 10 January 2026

Works by Daniel Burley, Jessie Evans, Carlotta Roma, Jim Shaw, Sophie Spedding, Will Vetch
Curated by Carlotta Roma and Will Vetch

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

"You are a good painter and a nice girl” German curator Kasper König patronizingly assured artist Lee Lozano in 1969. Lozano answered: “Wrong on both counts. I'm a very good painter and not a nice girl!”
– Lexington Davis for Metropolis M, 2020

Terse describes something short and laconic. Bringing together six contemporary artists under this title, Inspection Pit’s original group exhibition explores the impact of such a force on painting. In the works on show, lines and solid blocks of colour collide and compete, as if in verbal bouts – chucking out apertures, objects and weird figuration. For co-curators Roma and Vetch, terseness is a force that cuts through the image, opening up ‘a place where form, feeling and fuckup churn together in a dynamic of irresolvable problems, fertilized by our collective shit’. In painting, this terseness can assert itself in all manner of ways. It is about risk-taking, unashamedly so. It isn’t afraid of dealing with complicated subjects, making mis-steps and mistakes, testing and trying, again and again.

This exhibition is concerned with an enigmatic kind of painting – not the fantastical kind, which tries to create vivid illusions of reality through representation. Enigmatic painting instead centres the psychological. Mark-making becomes a language: a non-verbal interference with the image constructed. Mass is a core element of (or in) the painted enigma. In paintings crosscut by this terse language, figures, objects and landscapes suffuse across a surface into plump, churned up compositions that are both rich in matter and deprived of social hierarchy.

Imagine a painter flexing their muscles as they lift turgid subjects, utilitarian objects that carry as much weight as a reclining nude. Through terseness, their painting can transgress upon the canvas with an anarchic lust for palpable feeling. Mixing humour and poignancy, terseness is both release and new entanglement. It cleaves through complexity just as it winds us inside sticky new forms of puzzlement.

The exhibition is showing from 8 November 2025 - 10 January 2026 with a private view on Friday 7 November from 6-9 PM to celebrate the occasion.


TERSE
Daniel Burley, Jessie Evans, Carlotta Roma, Jim Shaw, Sophie Spedding, Will Vetch
Curated by Carlotta Roma and Will Vetch

8 November 2025 - 10 January 2026
Private view: Friday 7 November, 6-9 pm
Inspection Pit, East Harting, West Sussex, GU31 5LZ

Open by appointment only during exhibition dates, bookings are essential.