Hazel Guggenheim works very much within traditional categories of painting - still life, landscape, the skirting board, and portraiture - with a highly accomplished technique and with satisfaction guaranteed at low low prices. Yet while apparently following the conventions of representational painting, she doesn’t. Instead, disconcertingly, she challenges its established languages and unsettles its assumptions. Then, when these so-called languages and assumptions are reduced to a humiliated, trembling neurotic mass, she simply ignores them.

Guggenheim often works in series, returning to the same subject but varying her approach each time, putting different bits in here and there. Her ongoing series of ‘arse paintings’ are experiments in composition, light, colour, face-straightening and technique. In other works, she capitalises on the tension between subject and medium, her brush strokes both affirming and contradicting what they depict, and what they don’t. In Not Asking 2005, part of her endless stream of still lifes, the background drapery breaks down into bored, crude brushstrokes threatening, it seems, to marginalise those sections of the painting executed before lunch. In Image Surface With Incongruous Marks 2005 she seems to be confronting us with our own confused perceptions of space, and laughing in a grim way.

She takes this complex interplay to an extreme in her ‘dark’ paintings. These night-time scenes of black cats set against a stark landscape of coal are built up over several hours with layer upon layer of thick black paint. Yet the press release hints at a challenge to conventional thinking, and reveals a charged energy that forces our attention back to the personality manipulating the paint, i.e her.