28 September – 30 October 2026
The Bindery, 53 Hatton Garden, London EC1N 8HN
What does it mean for an artist to look at the past without simply repeating it? At Vivienne Roberts Projects, 100 Years: Translation as Invention approaches this question not as a history lesson, but as a living problem for painting: how can an image inherit something from the past and still become entirely its own?
Bringing together works by Francis Bacon, David Hockney, Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso with new paintings by Ann Dowker, Andrew Graves, Humphrey Ocean RA and Sara Lee Roberts, the exhibition sets up a conversation across generations rather than a neat chronology. Presented in collaboration with Fairhead Fine Art, it proposes that painting does not progress by leaving its past behind. It moves forward by looking again.
That distinction is important. Art history is often presented as a sequence of movements — Cubism giving way to Surrealism, abstraction challenging figuration, one generation reacting against the last. 100 Years: Translation as Invention offers another way of reading that history. Here, influence is less a matter of inheritance than of transformation. Artists take images, structures, ideas and visual experiences that already exist and put them through their own particular way of seeing.
Picasso is perhaps the clearest example. His relationship with the Old Masters was not one of reverence in the conventional sense. He repeatedly returned to established compositions and pictorial structures, taking them apart and reconstructing them according to his own logic. What mattered was not copying an earlier painting but discovering what could happen when its underlying architecture was pushed somewhere new.
Matisse approached the question differently. His encounters with Morocco, its textiles, ceramics, decorative patterns and intense light became part of a radically personal visual vocabulary. Rather than simply recording what he saw, he translated it into colour, rhythm, flatness and space. Decades later, his celebrated paper cut-outs took this process further still. Painting was no longer necessarily about applying pigment to a surface; colour itself could become shape, and shape could become space.
The exhibition’s idea of translation is therefore broader than the familiar notion of artistic influence. It is about what happens between looking and making.
This is particularly evident in the work of Francis Bacon, whose relationship with art history was both obsessive and disruptive. Bacon repeatedly returned to historical paintings, photographs and images of the human body, stripping them of their original narratives and subjecting them to a new pictorial intensity. The source image might remain recognisable, but its purpose changes. A portrait becomes sensation; a historical composition becomes a structure of psychological pressure.
David Hockney’s engagement with the past is similarly inquisitive rather than nostalgic. His interest in artists such as Piero della Francesca provided a way of thinking about space, perspective and clarity, while his own experiments with photography, collage, video and digital technologies continually challenged the conventions of pictorial representation. Across an extraordinarily varied career, Hockney has treated the image as something open to reconstruction.
This freedom to reconstruct is central to the exhibition. Its intellectual starting point also has a natural affinity with Paul Klee, whose work is not physically represented here but whose example informs the show’s thinking. Klee’s paintings demonstrate what it means to develop a visual language that feels internally coherent without being confined by a particular movement or doctrine. His approach suggests that originality does not necessarily mean beginning from nothing. It can mean learning how to transform what one encounters into a language that could only belong to you.
That idea becomes particularly pertinent when the historical artists are placed alongside the contemporary painters.
Ann Dowker has spent years studying and sketching Old Master paintings in museums around the world. Yet her engagement with that history does not result in pastiche. Instead, observation becomes a means of distillation. Landscape and the human figure are gradually reduced to essential forms, hovering between recognition and abstraction. The act of looking at earlier painting becomes part of a longer process of discovering how an image might be constructed.
For Sara Lee Roberts, the Old Masters similarly provide a starting point rather than an endpoint. Her paintings strip away much of the narrative and descriptive information traditionally associated with historical imagery, concentrating instead on light, colour and pictorial structure. What remains is something closer to rhythm — forms and colours interacting across the surface with a quality that feels almost musical.
Andrew Graves takes the question into a more poetic territory. His paintings construct situations in which colour and surface alter the viewer’s sense of perception. His engagement with Klee is especially relevant here: colour is not simply a means of describing the world but an active element in creating a pictorial reality. The painting does not merely show us something; it reorganises the way we see it.
Then there is Humphrey Ocean RA, whose work begins from a seemingly simpler proposition: looking carefully at the world in front of him. Often described as a painter of contemporary life, Ocean has a particular ability to make ordinary subjects feel newly available to perception. His economy is deceptive. The familiarity of the subject leaves room for the act of looking itself to become the subject.
Placed together, these practices make the title Translation as Invention feel less like a curatorial slogan and more like a description of how painting actually works.
A painting is never quite as isolated as it appears. It carries memories of other paintings, other images, other ways of seeing. It may begin with a landscape, a photograph, a museum visit, a remembered figure or a colour encountered by chance. But the source is only the beginning. The decisive moment comes when the artist changes it — compresses it, distorts it, simplifies it, fragments it or turns it into something that did not exist before.
This is why the exhibition resists the idea of a straightforward hundred-year survey. Its artists are separated by generations, circumstances and radically different approaches to making pictures, yet they share a fundamental impulse: to look again.
The result is less a timeline than a conversation. Picasso can sit beside a contemporary painter without the relationship becoming a simplistic story of influence. Matisse can be understood not merely as a historical figure but as an artist who repeatedly reinvented his own language. Bacon’s transformations of existing images can be read alongside today’s painters, for whom art history remains a resource rather than a closed archive.
At a moment when painting is often discussed in terms of its supposed return, revival or renewed relevance, 100 Years: Translation as Invention offers a more useful proposition. Perhaps painting never really returns because it never stands still in the first place.
It remembers, borrows, fragments, absorbs and transforms. It looks backwards in order to find another way forward.
And that may be the most enduring form of invention: not creating out of nothing, but seeing what already exists — and making it newly visible.