Tanya Leighton, Berlin, is pleased to announce ‘Grow Up’, a solo-exhibition by Elizabeth McIntosh. An experiment in graphic abstraction, McIntosh’s paintings are a joyful assemblage of colours and forms that parade across the canvas.

‘Grow Up’ can be read as an act of imploration, as a finger wagging playfully, as a joke between friends. It is tongue in cheek, which is to say that it can be construed differently depending on the cadence of speech or intonation. ‘Grow Up’ is also quite literally a large graffiti tag in Vancouver that McIntosh snapped a photo of as she drove by. This kind of foraging approach – collecting found images, references, snippets of art history or sketches from McIntosh’s own sketchbook − is immediately apparent in the stratified blocks and swathes of colours and forms (a collage-effect that harkens back to former bodies of work). Yet, in typical fashion, McIntosh’s paintings also display a playful approach, a constant experimentation akin to ‘growing up’: they are learning, employing intuition, adjusting based on past experience.

McIntosh employs the use of frames that act as latticed windows into the works. The layers and transparencies create a peripheral space that make the viewer aware of the process of looking. We are implicated in our gaze as we puzzle through the forms and figures on the canvas. There is a mischievous sort of reciprocity between McIntosh, the work and her audience. While this layering could have a distancing effect – bordering on voyeurism – it is also a channel for intimacy (like being able to glimpse into a family home at dusk before they draw the curtains, looking into a space that is both alien and familiar).

McIntosh also draws on visual quotations from the early modernist era of painting – a time that was ripe with experimentation, directness and new formal structures – as well as her own doodles, memories or family photos. While the background may feature appropriated imagery, the main protagonists of her canvases are drawn from life.

The works oscillate between figuration and abstraction, improvisation and design. She dances between references that interweave cropped figurations from art history with a strawberry or an ice cream cone: motifs taken from her daughter’s embroidered suede purse.

McIntosh’s free jazz approach embodies improvisation that mirrors a form of play. It feels that we, as viewers, are learning and inventing alongside McIntosh in ‘Grow Up’, in a gentle homage to a youth that slips through our fingers when we’re not looking, perhaps only able to be remembered via paint on canvas.