Francesca Mollett makes abstract paintings that tune themselves to their surroundings. She works through a deliberate, fluid process in which light, surface and edge are tested, layered, and reworked. Images begin with close looking and then shift as paint accumulates—planes brighten, thicken, or fall away—so that each canvas holds a live tension between glow and gravitas.
Literature often underpins her thinking, but not as illustration. Instead, colour and texture carry ideas that resist straightforward depiction: how time feels, how attention lingers, how perception changes. Organic forms appear and blur; distinctions soften until they read as terrains that feel new yet somehow remembered. By holding on to specificity while allowing forms to unfix, the work opens spaces for sustained looking and unguarded encounter.
Critic and curator Tom Morton has noted that Mollett’s paintings pursue what’s hard to pin down. For him, the dissolving contours of plants and insects don’t cancel meaning; they produce a sharper kind of precision, where thought seems to rise out of pigment. In this sense, her practice advances a clear claim for painting’s relevance: its capacity to illuminate delicate aspects of the world that evade simple naming.
Mollett also treats the painted surface as a threshold—an entry point to fragmented interior spaces where memory, flow, rupture, and anticipation overlap. She is interested in the exchange the work has with the viewer, using painting to loosen habits of looking and to reveal subtle patterns in everyday experience.
⸻
Biography
Francesca Mollett (b. 1991, Bristol, UK) received an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art, London (2020), and previously studied at the Royal Drawing School and Wimbledon College of Art.
Selected solo exhibitions: Annual Honesty, Modern Art, London (UK); Elsewhere, Warehouse, Dallas, TX (US); Corso, GRIMM, New York, NY (US); Noon, Pond Society, Shanghai (CN); Halves, GRIMM, Amsterdam (NL); Low Sun, Micki Meng, San Francisco, CA (US); The Moth in the Moss, Taymour Grahne Projects, London (UK); Spiral Walking, Baert Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (US); Wild Shade, Informality Gallery, London (UK).
Selected group exhibitions: The Kingfisher’s Wing (cur. Tom Morton), GRIMM, New York, NY (US), 2022; The Garden of Earthly Delights, GRIMM, New York, NY (US); In Other Worlds: Acts of Translation, The Roberts Institute of Art & Focal Point Gallery, Southend-on-Sea (UK); A Room Hung With Thoughts: British Painting Now (cur. Tom Morton), Green Family Art Foundation, Dallas, TX (US); Nature Painting Nature, Pilar Corrias, London (UK); New British Abstraction, CICA, Vancouver (CA); Considering Female Abstractions, Green Family Art Foundation, Dallas, TX (US); Sabrina (cur. Russell Tovey), Sim Smith, London (UK); New Romantics, The Artist Room at Lee Eugean Gallery, Seoul (KR).
Collections: Comico Art Museum Yufuin, Oita (JP); Dallas Museum of Art, TX (US); The David and Indrė Roberts Collection, London (UK); Green Family Art Foundation, Dallas, TX (US); He Art Museum, Foshan (CN); Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL (US); K11 Art Foundation, Hong Kong (HK); Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo (NL); Kunstmuseum Den Haag (NL); Pond Society, Shanghai (CN); The Rachofsky Collection, Dallas, TX (US); Sainsbury Centre, Norwich (UK); St Hilda’s College Art Collection, University of Oxford (UK).