Harper’s is pleased to announce Entanglements, a two-person exhibition featuring new work by British artists Eleanor Johnson and Lydia Makin. The presentation brings together paintings created over the past year, highlighting each artist’s commitment to weaving modernist gestural abstraction with the thematic and visual sensibilities of Baroque-era painting. Entanglements opens Thursday, January 8, 6–8pm, with a reception attended by both artists.
Eleanor Johnson draws from both the thematic concerns and painterly techniques of the Baroque Old Masters in this new suite of paintings. A defining presence across her work is a sense of excess, expressed through tumbling, fleshy bodies and mythic, bacchanalian scenes of ecstatic play or violence, with many compositions occupying an uneasy juncture between the two. Taking inspiration from Peter Paul Rubens’s muscular and voluptuous nudes, her figures are faceless and androgynous, stripped of individuating characteristics. These corporeal forms melt together and disintegrate into turbulent brushstrokes that swirl across the canvas in an unstable pictorial world. Beyond the immediacy of her gestural abstraction, pentimento—the presence of underlying tracings from previous iterations of an artwork—is central to Johnson’s practice, marrying the painterly act with the substance of the drama unfolding within her images. Rather than concealing these residual marks, she embraces them as integral to the final outcome. Her process is instinctive and aleatory, informed in part by her experience of hypnagogic states in which reality slips and logic gives way to the absurd. By foregrounding previous layers and improvisational gestures, Johnson’s use of pentimento lends a surrealist inflection to her subject matter: a relinquishing of control that allows the medium to surface subconscious expression.
Like Johnson, the first order of painting for Lydia Makin is a process of discovery through the act of mark making. Her approach is intuitive and spontaneous, addressing the blank canvas without preparatory sketches or predetermined plans beyond the colors she sets out on her palette. Working at an immersive scale, Makin’s sweeping brushstrokes and overlapping washes maintain a visceral relationship to the body, functioning as both indexes of her labor and portals that draw viewers into the ethereal vistas she constructs. Paradise Lost, her monumental triptych, exemplifies this immersive physicality and the expansive, searching energy that defines her practice. Much like the automatism she embraces in the act of creation—where the materials assume agency and guide her movements as if they had a life of their own—Makin’s paintings beckon viewers to surrender themselves to their sensuous nature. While the gestural language of Abstract Expressionism is acutely present in her work, she also draws on the atmospheric depth and emotional intensity associated with the Baroque. Rather than aligning herself with either tradition, Makin animates the expressive continuum that stretches from the Baroque into high modernism, looking particularly to the charged surfaces of Goya, whose painterly drama anticipates modernist sensibilities. Through this synthesis, her sensitivity to exposing her process becomes a driving force, transforming historical impulses into something distinctly her own.
Together, Johnson and Makin exemplify a new generation of British painters who are redefining the relationship between art history and our contemporary moment. Entanglements brings their painterly practices into dialogue, revealing how each artist mobilizes improvisational gesture and traditional motifs to traverse the space between Baroque drama and modernist abstraction. Their paintings share an attunement to the body—both the artist’s in making and the viewer’s embodied experience—alongside a sensitivity to the medium’s unpredictable life. In this, Johnson and Makin stand on the leading edge of a renewed renaissance currently unfolding within London’s young painting scene.
Eleanor Johnson (b. 1994, Oxfordshire, UK) received an MA from City & Guilds London Art School in 2023, and a BA from University College London in 2017; in addition, Johnson was an artist-in-residence at GJG, Casteggio, IT in 2022, and Palazzo Monti, Bescia, IT in 2019. Her work has been the subject of solo and two-person presentations at Gillian Jason Gallery, London (2024 and 2023), and Paul Smith, London (2020). Most recently, Johnson has participated in group exhibitions at Tang Contemporary Art, Seoul (2025); Blue Shop Cottage, London (2025); NADA, New York (2025); VOLTA, Basel (2024); Kwai Fung Salone, Hong Kong (2023); Gillian Jones Gallery, London and online (2022 and 2021); and Galerie Hussenot, Paris (2021). Johnson lives and works in Oxfordshire.
Lydia Makin (b. 1997, Nottingham, UK) received an MA from Royal College of Art in 2024, and a BA from Slade School of Fine Art in 2020; in 2024, she was an artist-in-residence at PM/AM, London, where her work was the subject of a solo presentation, 57. In addition, Makin’s work has been exhibited at Nassima Landau, Tel Aviv (2025); Studio West, London (2023 and 2022); D Contemporary, London (2023); Gallery Rosenfeld, London (2022); W1 London (2020); and Hix Art Gallery, London (2018). Makin lives and works in London.