Lyles & King is pleased to present A Skeleton to Share, an exhibition of new gouache on paper paintings by London-based artist Jessie Makinson.

Makinson's new paintings flow like an interwoven collection of short stories. They are intimate in scale, exquisitely rendered, and demand slow, sustained attention. Composed of gouache with inflections of colored pencil, the works carry the precision and compressed intensity of Persian and Turkish miniature painting, a tradition the artist has engaged since her studies in Edinburgh. Flat, foregrounded pictorial space akin to early Renaissance painting, teamed with richly layered color, lends each work a fertile resonance. Each painting is a world unto itself that Makinson threads together with recurring figures, objects, and environments.

The exhibition title A Skeleton to Share evokes a darkly comic sensibility alluding to her preoccupations with environmental precarity, life's temporality, and a baroque fascination with pleasure. Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain serves as a structural touchstone, informing scenes of convalescence, séance, therapy, and sociality drawn from an eclectic archive spanning art history, cinema, and literature. References to Vuillard, Goya, Balthus, William Blake, and Otto Dix coalesce alongside 1970s Czech film, British sex comedy, and Anne Serre's fiction. Her references accumulate with the logic of historically promiscuous private obsession as time jumps between a Victorian-inflected past and an indeterminate present. The resulting paintings of A Skeleton to Share are figurative works of rare imaginative density that reward close, thoughtful engagement.