LONDON.- Cherry, cherry brings together paintings Charlotte Winifred Gu閞ard made between the Royal Academy Schools studios (summer 2025) and the Hampshire countryside (Xenia residency, spring 2026). Each work is an abstraction that responds to Gu閞ard's inner worlds - shades of thoughts, distant memories, and more tangible experiences of life meet on the canvas.

The title, Cherry, cherry, captures the feeling of jumping from spring to summer, when persistent, piercing light enhances the colours around us - a temporal shift echoed by the lazy, heat-imbued mood of JJ Cale's "Cherry”, which influenced Gu閞ard at the time. The show stages a dialogue between materiality and external observation. Works such as Esquise (2025) and La Valse (2025) condense layers and bold marks that hint at representation but remain largely abstract; while the hanging works reveal the underlayers of a painting and staining that takes place on the surfaces.

The motifs draw on imaginary worlds, with nods to the circus, dance, and play, rendered in vivid reds, blacks, and purples. Set against these, direct references to the botanical scenes of Hampshire move the work toward a palette of earthy ochres, deep forest blues, and sun-bleached pinks.

The installation considers the multiplicity of these layers. It invites the audience to move with the work, around it, behind it - to discover the foundations and traces of the process of painting. The exhibition continues Gu閞ard's reflection on painting in space, apprehending the medium outside its borders and pushing the scale to attempt a physical response to the work.

Charlotte Winifred Gu閞ard’s practice questions the ways in which a painting can be viewed, activated and displayed today. Her process is about finding structures or systems which allow her to experiment with her medium whilst considering space, time, performance, and movement. The themes attached to her images are influenced by her immediate surroundings, landscapes, the everyday and memory which overall makeup her ‘Dictionary of Ideas and Images’.

“In many ways, Gu閞ard’s studio is a laboratory; a place where the artist examines and builds on her ever-expanding repertoire of images and ideas, testing the boundaries of what is possible. It’s an art of process and accumulation, a way, she explains, of thinking about the agency of painting – not only ‘how it’s behaving’ but ‘how I’m behaving’. As much as she’s immersed in the art of the past, Gu閞ard’s gaze is fixed firmly on the future. As she explains, she’s ‘taking a very traditional medium and thinking about how it can be looked at now'”.

Excerpt from Dictionary of Ideas and Images, an Essay by Jennifer Higgie