Silke Otto-Knapp, Monday or Tuesday, Camden Arts Centre

Before he died in 2012, the great art critic Robert Hughes called for ‘slow art…. art that holds time as a vase holds water… that grows out of modes of perception and making’. He might have been speaking of the work of Silke Otto-Knapp, a German artist resident in London, whose delicate, layered paintings are in this dreamlike show at Camden Arts Centre.

     The young artist Otto-Knapp (she was born in 1970), makes pictures in gouache and watercolour – water-based and delicate, often in a lunar silvery-grey palette – that become absorbed by canvas when painted onto it. (Watercolours are usually on paper to avoid this effect). What emerges is a sense of evanescence that really pulls you into her pictures, compounding the feeling that you’re entering a magical world. Her pieces are like looking out to sea - and indeed several images in the show take advantage of this, depict boats and choppy waters.

      Because of her method, Otto-Knapp’s work is catnip to those who see a return to painting as the only authentic mode of representation – particularly as she uses watercolour, often seen (wrongly) as a traditional medium. But this is not cosy work – her pictures are uncanny and unsettling in some ways, and invite many interpretations about perception.

      Some of her paintings are reminiscent of stage design: one thinks, when looking at them, of Midsummer Night’s Dream. As it turns out, Otto-Knapp likes drawing performers and has painted PJ Harvey and Patti Smith as well as several dancers. In the first week of this exhibition, choreographer-dancer Flora Wiegmann will be in residence in the Artists’ Studio at Camden Arts Centre, as part of the exhibition, with costumes designed by Otto-Knapp.

      Another favourite subject of Otto-Knapp’s is architecture, often rendering glass-like botanical gardens, glasshouses and cityscapes whose forms disappear into the sky. You should also look out for her paintings of Virginia Woolf’s sometime home, Sissinghurst in Kent: a connection which emerges again in the exhibition’s title (taken from Woolf’s 1921 story), likewise the 2012 exhibition Voyage Out, which refers to Woolf’s 1915 novel. Dance aficionados may by now be reminded of the great Russian ballet impresario Diaghilev – famed for bringing the worlds of art and theatre together – and Otto-Knapp makes that connection specific with pictures drawn of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, written for the Ballet Russes. A truly rewarding show.