She also references Anaglypta wallpaper. Her wall drawing paraphrases Courbet's monumental painting The Artist's Studio, a seminal modernist work which assertively placed art and artists at the centre of its world. All of which is a relatively new direction for Iremonger, tentatively explored as yet, but interesting in its possibilities. Charles Harper's exhibition at the Hallward features episodes in two of his long-term series of symbolically charged images, his rowers and his grid composites of figures under stress. However, it is his landscape paintings that really shine.
Harper is a highly skilled draftsman with a crisp, precise touch.
One feels that he is not at heart a naturalistic painter and is more comfortable playing around with pictorial ideas than with atmospheric description. So in a way the notion that he would make interesting landscape paintings casts him against type. Yet that is pretty much what he does. In fact, throughout the group of big landscapes included in the show, he is painting with great liveliness and verve. His Burren View, with its recessive grid of limestone pavement, is terrifically alive, a pendant to the subdued greys of Estuary.