The basement viewing rooms of Compass Gallery offer a suitably homely setting for Pen Reid’s bountiful new selection of paintings and drawings (48 in all). These works mostly allude to gardens and domestic spaces while using an expressionist colour palette and surreal compositional arrangements to suggest an encroaching dream-world. Introducing the series, Jill Berber writes that Reid’s studio is located ‘down a winding pathway at the bottom of her garden . . . it is expansive and breathing, a place flooded with light . . . the windows look back up onto her garden which feeds her interest in the garden as “a controlled space”.’

The naturalistic cue for this new sequence is evident in its strongly figurative aspects, often homing in on the details of backyards, tenements or houses. There are bathtubs, deckchairs, little paved courtyards, kids, birds, trees, mirrors, a washing line: a domestic idyll of sorts is evoked. The colour palette is sweet, almost self-consciously cloying at times, with pinks and purples in abundance. But something’s not hanging together; and it’s not meant to. The bathroom is filling with water, and there are otters swimming in the flood. A birch tree is growing through the living-room floor. A section of building appears as a stage set with a wider landscape of abstract planes. A pink picket fence opens onto an interior with a pram and a door that swings back to reveal a deep-space swirl of blue. 

There are ample art-historical references to help us unpick this world of dreams and anxieties. Peter Doig’s woozy tonal range and play at the abstract-figurative threshold seem an influence at times. At others, Moyna Flannigan’s macabre fairytale collages spring to mind. Gerber mentions the influence of Carel Weight’s intimistic paintings, in which ‘a sense of foreboding hangs over those experiencing what appear to be insignificant domestic events’. The exhibition text also points to traces of inspiration from Hiroshige, such as the use of eye-catching pattern to flatten and draw attention to sections of canvas. This show offers, as its name suggests, a look behind the curtain at an artistic universe in which the lightness and the dark are enticingly mixed.

Reviewed at Compass Gallery, Glasgow.