Sculptural Use of Paint

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Paint usually describes form; here it becomes form. Heavy impasto has a long history, from Rembrandt's built-up highlights to Vincent van Gogh's ridged strokes, but some 20th-century painters pushed paint into relief. After 1945 Jean Dubuffet thickened his paint with sand, tar and gravel into crusted fields, and in London Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff laid on layer after layer until their pictures became heavy, encrusted objects.

Later artists loosened paint from its support altogether. Lynda Benglis's poured latex and foam pieces of the late 1960s sit between painting and sculpture, and Jason Martin drags a comb through thick gel to raise deep, glossy ridges. Others build free-standing works from dried skins or stacked blobs of acrylic, so that colour and object are one. Look at edges and profiles, where thickness shows, and at surfaces that cast shadows across themselves.