August 17, 2026–Official Welcome is excited to announce Ann Thornycroft’s solo exhibition, Paint, oil, water, opening on September 5, 2026. Composed entirely of work made over the last year, the exhibition finds Thornycroft in peak form, capturing light, atmosphere, and feeling with exuberant energy.
For several decades now, Thornycroft has been refining her abstract painting practice, working to embody herself in the work and paint from a place of female subjectivity. The grand tradition of modern abstraction in the West began around 1914 with artists like Kandinsky, Dove, and O’Keeffe. By the 1940s, New York had replaced Paris as the center of the western art world, a shift tied to war in Europe, the mass displacement of European artists and intellectuals, and new institutions like MoMA and the Guggenheim eagerly building collections of new art. Abstract Expressionism, the style that emerged from this shift, lent itself eagerly to grand narratives of American superiority and the soft imperialism of the postwar period. Born in England at the end of the Second World War, Thornycroft’s training, socialization, and migration trace this same shift of cultural power from Europe to the United States, and the oscillating position of the avant-garde from New York to Los Angeles. As an Angelena, I’m required to reluctantly acknowledge that New York remains the center of the art world today, or risk too-obvious salesmanship. Los Angeles continues to be a leading edge of artistic production, and Thornycroft’s increasingly electric paintings embody tensions between different schools of abstraction that illustrate the vitality and continuing possibilities of a deeply committed formal practice today.
Thornycroft arrived in Venice Beach in the early 1970s, having come first from London to New York and then to Los Angeles. From the beginning of her time in Los Angeles, her paintings embodied a push-pull between control and chaos: using a carefully drawn 12″ x 12″ grid, her work balances atmospheric pours of thin pigment against the control and rationale of hard-edge geometry, each destabilizing the other, refusing to settle into any one thing. She soon introduced rounded edges to this gridded structure, so that four units together would form a circle inside a square, or two units would form a vesica piscis, a seed-shaped form associated with feminine energy. While the grid’s relationship to quilting and textile forms approaches some of the interests of Los Angeles’ Pattern and Decoration painters, Thornycroft’s work never reaches the maximalism of painters like Miriam Schapiro and Joyce Kozloff; and because the grid is always in tension with her Venice Beach sfumato and poured color fields, the paintings also reject the commitment to hard-edge abstraction exemplified by artists like Helen Lundeberg in this period. Nonetheless, her work then and now encompasses a range of formal concerns seemingly at odds with each other and arguments can be made to align her work with Pattern & Decoration, Hard-Edge Abstraction, Light & Space, Color Field Painting, and so on, and she has allies and fans across all of these named sub-categories. (Bob Irwin at one point helped her secure an NEA grant to support her studio practice.)
Her newest work reflects an evolution of her long-commitment to the grid. In many paintings, it is present only as a faint shadow of pencil marking the 12”x12” squares across the surface, with two or three of her round-edged equilateral triangles marking the surface and asserting the presence of this structure. Elsewhere, in paintings like Ancient Glass, 2026 the grid is subsumed by sea foam churning through the openings and dripping down to obscure this pattern. The grid often functions like a mask or architecture that contains the raw emotionality of color and gesture in Thornycroft’s work. It is a sort of restraint. With this dissolution, restraint is still acknowledged as necessary, but vulnerability, openness, and expression take the foreground. A tidy metaphor for how time might empower a woman artist who is and always has been resolutely committed to her own vision of painting.
Ann Thornycroft was born and raised in England. She earned her BA from the Central School of Art in London and a Higher Diploma in art at the Chelsea School of Art.
Solo exhibitions include Bergamot Station Arts Complex, Canal Club, Citrus Restaurant, Deanna Izen Miller Gallery, District, Four Seasons Hotel, Irene Drori Inc., Jancar Gallery, Royce Gallery, Rumba, Sam Francis Gallery, Ochi Gallery, Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Thomas Babeor Gallery, Valerie Miller Gallery, West Beach Cafe, and Works Gallery.
Group exhibitions include Andrea Meislin Gallery, Christopher John Gallery, Chryssanthou Gallery, Deanna Izan Miller Gallery, Fresh Paint, Gallery 258, Gensler & Associates, Hamilton Press, L.A.C.M.A. Rental Gallery, L.J.B. Gallery, Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, Molly Barnes Gallery, Ochi Gallery, Roberts Projects, Ruth Bachofner Gallery, and The Works Gallery.
Thornycroft’s work is in the public collections of 20th Century Fox, ARCO Corporation, Ashton Tate, Bank of America, Boise Art Museum, Cedars Sinai Comprehensive Cancer Care Center, Cedars Sinai Medical Center, Century Cable, Children’s Hospital, Computer Science Corporation, Disney Studios, Equitable Life, Financial News Network, Gibraltar Savings, GTE Headquarters, Hallmark, Hillman Properties, Hofstedler, Home Box Office, Four Seasons Hotels, Kaiser Permanente, Korn/Ferry International Long Beach Museum of Art, Leeds City Art Gallery, Long Beach Museum of Art, Marshall Fields, McKenna, Conner & Cuneo, Mercedes Benz, New World Picture, Pep Boys, Pepsico, Plymouth City Art Gallery, Portsmouth City Art Gallery, Portland Art Museum, Robinsons, Royal Caribbean, Security Pacific National Bank, Sitmar Star Princess, The Blankfort Collection, The Bren Company, Tokyo Park Tower, Transamerica, Western Asset Management, Vesti Trust International, Weisberg & Aronson, Wells Fargo Bank, Westin Hotel, Arthur Young, and Yukevich. Her works have been featured in California Magazine, L.A. Weekly, Los Angeles Times, New York Magazine, Quatro Magazine, and Venice Magazine. She lives and works in Los Angeles, California.
