Christina Mackie: Material Reality
Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art, London
30 January – 19 April 2026
Walking into the first room of Christina Mackie’s solo exhibition at Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art is like entering a shipbuilding yard – all at once you are surrounded by towering cranes. These are a suite of paintings, some new and some dating back to 1985, when her work, although still decorated with her trademark “splats”, was a lot heavier and more loaded with paint. In fact, the works in this room, which make up an installation called Dissolve, are hung according to their material weight, with the upper row comprising diaphanous, yet still industrial, watercolours. In the corner, reaching up to this skyline is a rough, linen, cylindrical sculpture, with eyes cut into it at the height of the paintings – suggesting something about the vantage point of the works, of the cranes, of the skyline … Turn around and a video is playing, showing the reality of just this – the view from Mackie’s cabin on Mayne Island, just off the coast of Vancouver. The title Dissolve is appropriate on a number of levels: in the film, the view itself dissolves into the mist, with lights flashing from the cranes; in the paintings, the cranes dissolve into abstraction, reduced to their basic circular and rectangular forms; and in two paintings, which stand out from the rest, two human forms dissolve into the light, barely silhouetted against its ferocity, pigmenting in its biting rays.
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