Evangeline Turner
Liste Art Fair Basel
16–22 June 2025
Preview: Monday 16 June, 11 am–6 pm


a. SQUIRE presents new oil paintings and works on paper by Evangeline Turner for Liste 2025. The booth is recast as a beige-carpeted salon, the kind one might find in an expensive English country house that was last decorated in the 1980s. A setting of distant-memory debauchery and recent economic decline, it conjures moth infestations, shifts in regime, residual political incorrectness, and the fraying of the old guard.
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At its centre hangs Zero, a small painting of a mother and her stillborn child, the background a tight Piet Mondrian pastiche. On the adjacent walls are larger canvases variously populated with robots, spiralling coasters, and a chimeric cheetah-cum-parlour maid. In Tree, the repoussoir installed by the flanking silhouettes of a pregnant tree and her male echo gives way to a Michelangelo remix inflected with the dynamism of the Futurists. In Mud, the deliquescent face of a seersucker bow tie-sporting Humpty Dumpty matches the boggy ground on which he sits. Bondservant dislocates the historical device of mise en abyme, featuring a miniature version not of itself but of the neighbouring painting, Sofa. And in the nearby vitrine, ‘rebel heiress’ Nancy Cunard looks crestfallen.
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Turner’s anachronistic avatars gargle the unthinkable landscapes of the 2020s and spit them out again with disembodied bluntness. Droll humour and the utmost sincerity are served in equal measure; thematic and compositional perversions are rife. And yet, the works also disclose a propensity for modesty, the pleasures of puritanism, and the insistence of the canon. This is English Painting with a post-Brexit, post-Empire, twilight zone tang.
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A publication with tipped-in plates accompanies the presentation.