Chris Sharp Gallery is pleased to present a group exhibition at Tanya Leighton, Berlin. Entitled ‘Trespass sweetly urged’, the presentation consists of a selection of works by six artists from Chris Sharp Gallery’s programme.

The title of the exhibition comes from the first act of Romeo and Juliet, when Romeo exclaims, after kissing Juliet, “Sin from my lips? O trespass sweetly urged! / Give me my sin again.” Essentially an act of transgression, the kiss, through the lens of the exhibition, becomes a metaphor for painting. Painting is read as forbidden fruit, as sin, as wrongdoing, mired in prejudice and preconception – it is an arrant cash cow whose complicity in the alleged malevolence of the market precludes it from possessing any critical, philosophical or political valence – to embrace it is all but an act of betrayal (of whom? Or what? Art?). Yet closely examined, a many-layered sweetness abounds, as with the artists in this exhibition. Behold not only the voluptuous heterogeneity of their mark-making but also their collective refusal to take the medium for granted. Each artist here practices painting, not as a given, but as a complex historical object and tradition which has to be reconsidered anew.

Notions of good taste and conventional beauty are challenged by Sophie Barber’s delightfully messy, impish and literal inflations of painting and Laura Larraz’s brash dismissals of received femininity. Adam Higgins’s meticulously crafted, pseudo-photorealistic paintings of Caesar salad and Anna Glantz’s improbable, simultaneously symbolic and figurative landscapes both play with surface and facture in novel and surprising ways. Meanwhile, Ishi Glinsky and Tom Allen engage, albeit with very different approaches, in a kind of chromo- mania that all but overwhelms the eye. Where Ishi Glinsky imbues Indigenous American lore with a fluid and impastoed spectrum of color, Tom Allen surgically transforms carnivorous flowers into an infernal and mind-bending encyclopedia of pigment itself. In each and every case, one can feel the artists in this exhibition deliberately exerting pressure on the practice of applying paint to canvas.