Games of Chance and suburban interiors, huntsmen and dream sequences: the world that British artist Rachel Lumsden evokes in her Oeuvre seems at once both familiar and exotic. These, at first glance apparently figurative paintings defy classification, seeming at most to stem from a collective image-quarry, from art historical sources, popular culture and internal images. Lumsden's approach to the handling of paint both as material and colour is radical: image converges with paint-substance taking on distinctly abstract life of their own. The book Drunk in Charge of a Bicycle, named after the Licensing Act 1872, which declared it an offence to be drunk in charge of a bicycle on a highway or public place, juxtaposes large-format paintings with the artist's photographs of European and Asian cities. For Lumsden the City functions almost as does an enigma machine, perpetually churning out unlimited combinations and possibilities. Here painting and photographs do not serve as the key to one another but consult and converse in a free, non-thematic arc of visual tension. Collectively the combination of small 'snapshots' and large paintings lends this book independence as an artwork in its own right, exceeding the parameters of the physical exhibition space. Essays from Axel Jablonski and Robert Guy Wilson track the theme of cultural identity in Lumsden's Oeuvre, grounding the work both in a specific British painting tradition, whilst placing it firmly in the 'here and now' of contemporary art.
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