This summer, SPACE TO BREATHE will host a selling exhibition of the ground-breaking British painter Sheila Girling (1924-2015). Over 90 of her large scale paintings and collages from the 1970s to the 2010s will showcase her enormous talent as a painter simultaneously embracing the freedom of American abstraction while remaining rooted in a distinctive British sensibility. Evident in all Girling’s work is her understanding of the power to express emotion and form through the fortuitous juxtaposition of colour, combined with her unique exploration of the materiality of paint itself.

The exhibition will include a selection of important sculptures by the renowned sculptor Sir Anthony Caro, Girling’s husband and lifelong artistic collaborator. Girling described their marriage as “a 64 year conversation about art” and they both freely admitted her influence on his work, in particular the decision to use paint and colour as an integral part of his sculptural work. It is an honour to exhibit these two individual yet deeply connected artists side by side, while focussing attention on the woman in this creative partnership.

Girling’s work is a testament to an artistic life led at the centre of the British and American avant-garde art scene from the 1960s until her death in 2015. Her and Caro's close circle included the seminal art theorist Clement Greenberg and artists Jules Olitski, Robert Motherwell and Helen Frankenthaler, to name but a few. Girling’s close friend Kenneth Noland encouraged her to switch to acrylic paint ,which she used for the rest of her life.

Standing in front of her compelling works, one cannot help but admire her artistic individuality, emotional range and immediacy. Both Girling's large canvasses and smaller paper collages dazzle in their intensity. They are abstract and yet grounded in figuration, evoking the natural world while expressing the dynamic qualities of the media themselves.