The Mayor Gallery is set to open Worship Paintings, a contemplative solo exhibition by Tanya Ling that sees the artist push her signature line-based practice into new territory. Marking her second show with the gallery, the exhibition features a series of large-scale oil-on-linen works—her first time using the medium in this format—each committed to a single colour and a single, unbroken act of drawing.
These are not paintings about worship, the exhibition insists, but paintings of worship. Created through a slow, continuous movement of line, each piece is less an image than an act—an accumulation of time, breath, and quiet resolve. Ling’s longstanding exploration of line is transformed here from gesture to structure, from illustration to incantation.
While minimal in form, the works are maximal in intent. Their surfaces are exacting yet open, deliberate yet vulnerable to mistake. The artist’s process—solitary, patient, and deeply inward—is etched into the fabric of the canvas itself. As art writer Gilda Williams has noted, Ling’s practice draws power from its inward pull: a commitment to repetition that borders on the spiritual.
Critics have drawn comparisons to figures like Brice Marden, Joan Mitchell, and Cy Twombly—not because Ling quotes them, but because she shares their belief in abstraction as a form of devotion, attention, and emotional resonance. These works are about what happens when the act of painting becomes something more like prayer: less about control than surrender, less about image than presence.
Andrew Renton has aptly described Ling’s process as “faith in motion,” an idea echoed throughout the exhibition. The paintings feel at once meditative and charged, speaking to what can be found in doing the same thing over and over again—and discovering that it’s never really the same.
In a time when spectacle often overtakes sincerity in contemporary art, Worship Paintings is a quiet but insistent gesture: toward slowness, toward dedication, and perhaps toward the infinite.
Worship Paintings opens on 31 July through 6 September.
