Like memories which alter with each retelling, Anna Clegg’s interior paintings are similarly hazy in atmosphere, their darkened corners highlit from eye-level height. For ‘Blonde Redhead’, the five interiors are painted in the days after her move to a new flat in London.

Drawn from skewed photographs she’s taken, the scattered array of belongings and accrued boxes, to her, inhabit an ‘almost sculptural presence’. She documents them as to draw us to the ‘psychological processing of ubiquitous life events’, memorialising moments that would otherwise be forgotten. These are accompanied by three paintings of miscellaneous paraphernalia roaming her desk, their close definition drawing parallels to quodlibet paintings by Samuel van Hoogstraten¹ from 17th century or more recently Lucy McKenzie², who both adopted the genre of trompe l’œil in which everyday objects are painted with seemingly photorealistic perfection. 

Up close, Anna’s paintings are decidedly more blurry. Their blotchy appearance is akin to the effect of watercolour on paper, further obfuscating the scenes. Belongings are spared definition in favour of soft folds of sheets and curves of the surrounding architecture. Painter Gerhard Richter wrote that ‘I blur things to make everything equally important and equally unimportant’. Anna does this too, in similarly cryptic ways. Drawn to painters who also paint from their homespun surroundings including, Vilhelm Hammershøi³, Paul Cézanne⁴ and Markus Lüpertz⁵, their varying handlings of paint isolates these intimate sights from exact replication, favouring certain impressionistic mark-making.

Her background as a musician informs a wide-ranging pool of references, including a photograph of Glasgow band The Male Nurse standing in front of a László Moholy-Nagy⁶ painting, or an advertisement for Issey Miyake Men by Hideki Nakajima⁷. These are all but a few glimpses into her inspirations which stretch beyond painting, the title itself ‘Blonde Redhead’ plucked from an American band she admires.

Each piece is subject to its own hidden story, often her quotidian compositions veiling a plethora of concepts behind. Clegg notes of being drawn to ‘lonely and depressive’ sights, as she brings attention to subtle ambiguities of everyday existence. Although detailed in their accuracy, Anna’s paintings leave us in a state of limbo, their awkward unbalanced aperture rendering them both uncannily familiar, yet also unknown.

In the three paintings of her desk, pens, Blu-Tack, staples, glasses, tissues, are accompanied by painted stills taken from Gaspar Noe’s film ‘Enter The Void’. Paralleling the interiors and also zooming in closer  on particular possessions, she says she chooses the film stills ‘because of this particular lingering presence and recognisability that attaches to people’s own sense of style the film conveys’. The use of this bygone reference encapsulates all of what Anna’s paintings stand for, distilling moments that uncannily resemble our own human condition, filtered through more disguised allusions which strike a more curious reminiscence.