Meet the Ardwick Realists: the new northern soul of British painting

I’m in the back of a Toyota Prius on the A6010 Manchester Inner Ring Road. It’s been pissing it down for the last 20 minutes but is now easing off. As my driver pulls up to our destination, I look through damp streaks of mizzle on the window and behold the sprawling Maple Industrial Estate complex. I’ve been waiting for this moment for months. To the uninitiated eye, this place won’t look like much. The crosshatch of open concrete and cheap-brick architecture is just like any of the unremarkable estates in this neighbourhood in Ardwick, central Manchester. It’s slightly grim and certainly cold, a remnant of the city’s dwindling industrial base. But over the past three years, Maple has become a centre for British painting.

As figurative art has enjoyed a resurgence in museums and markets over recent years, a particular current of hyper-real surfaces, populated by often strange, macabre and disturbing references to Old Masters and gore, has emerged in paintings by a younger generation in the North West. From London’s crisis of studio space to the widespread closure of the country’s art schools, I have a hunch that the tight-knit group working behind these walls have some secrets to share. As the sun peeked out from the clouds, and with a sense of early-career collective action in the air, I went in to find out.

Inspired by the social commitments of kitchen-sink realism, the striking visual juxtapositions of the surrealists and the endearing moodiness of the Mancunian temperament, Maple artists Louise Giovanelli, Tommy Harrison, and Robin Megannity have developed shared compositional approaches that reimagine how we see sex, violence and the image in contemporary British life.

The Maple studio complex itself is a rabbit warren of interlocking studios and makeshift exhibition spaces. Harrison’s space is out the back: the last in a long line of what feels like an army barrack of units overlooking a post-industrial no-man’s land of discarded machine parts and overgrown grass. He greets me at the door with a beaming grin. To all intents and purposes, Harrison is an unlikely artist. Born in Stockport (a half-hour cycle away), he studied architecture in Sheffield and practised in Amsterdam, and only committed himself to painting three years ago. He is now one of the country’s most promising talents and, like Giovanelli, is represented by GRIMM gallery (more on them in a sec), with whom Harrison has already had two solo shows, in New York and Amsterdam. Having started out as Giovanelli’s studio assistant, Harrison exudes the charm of a cheeky chappy chancer who can’t quite believe his luck that he has found where he is meant to be. He shows me around. There are several half-finished paintings on the wall, some with exposed under drawings ruled with tailor’s chalk. You can tell he has spent time scouring Dutch museums for still life scenes, or vanitas paintings which depict flayed animal carcasses and sinister puritanical light and remind you of your mortality. There’s a dark side to his cheery demeanour.

Megannity, a touch older than Harrison, exudes the authority of someone who has been in the game a long time: someone who knows what kind of artist he is, and doesn’t have much time for playing the game of gallery dinners and feigned niceties. There is work to be done. According to many, Megannity is a painter’s painter, balancing filmic photo-realism and blurred edges of incongruous objects long before Issy Wood or Joseph Yaeger. He started out making abstractions when he studied at Cardiff School of Art & Design; now, he tells me, he “makes paintings that sound like Joy Division and look like Velázquez.” Megannity grew up in Pendlebury, the site of the most famous witch trials in English history, and likes reading Samuel Beckett: “all moody shit”, he says. But there’s joy behind his distinctly northern disposition. I  get the feeling that Megannity has had to compromise much to be an artist: he gave up a more stable career in graphic design and has had to pick up odd jobs to keep afloat, but there is no sense he has compromised what he wants to paint. He credits that to working where he does, in this community.

Giovanelli has freshly returned to Manchester from Hong Kong, where she installed a major show of her work with White Cube, who represents her alongside GRIMM. This is one example of an increasingly common commercial model whereby a blue-chip behemoth partners with a mid-sized gallery (the one that took the punt on the artist to begin) so as to protect the ecology of the primary market. “If you look at GRIMM’s roster of artists, you’ll see that many of them are based or studied outside of a capital city or art metropolis”, Giovanelli notes. “One thing that struck me when Jorg Grimm made contact is that he didn’t care where I was based or where my studio was; Jorg was prepared to travel for a studio visit regardless, and didn’t bat an eyelid.” This was rare at the time. She continues: “Before GRIMM I had had some requests from galleries for studio visits but as soon as I told them where my studio was (Manchester and then Frankfurt), they made excuses or went silent” and, remarkably, one blue-chip gallery even suggested she move because it would be too hard for them to bring collectors to the grim north.

Now Giovanelli and the cast of other painters working here are authentically developing the kind of whispered buzz – the shared purpose of a distinctive movement, perhaps – that collectors and gallerists would spend a fortune trying to artificially create.

No doubt, Giovanelli is already a major figure in contemporary art. Her paintings go for several hundred thousand on the secondary market and her extraordinary portraits, renderings of curtains and painstaking depictions of hair follicles will be the subject of a major exhibition at the Hepworth in Wakefield in November. Not bad for an artist who is not yet 32. Straddling Catholic iconography and the tinsel-in-the-summer feel of working men’s clubs, Giovanelli makes paintings of mouths agape waiting for communion (or else something much more illicit) as her work probes new forms of worship, from technology to the entertainment industry. It’s clear this anti-hierarchical group of artists don’t believe much in leaders, but Giovanelli embodies the strongheaded make-shit-happen attitude of one. She talks of the current ‘zeitgeist’ in Manchester but is quick to stress it wasn’t created by magic. She explains how, after graduating from the city’s purpose-built, north-facing School of Art in 2015, it took her nearly a year to get a studio. She first got into Rogue Studios (“now luxury flats”) and then Paradise Works (which had low ceilings, lots of stairs, and no chance of a lease extension).  Both Rogue and Paradise Works “were quite branded and demanded adherence to a particular code… we wanted to foreground the art making”, she asserts. Giovanelli stumbled upon Maple by accident and, with Megannity, and fellow artists Nicola Ellis, Nina Chua and Richard Dean-Hughes, set up shop in Ardwick. They have never looked back. “We found shared visual relationships and sympathies”, Giovanelli says – now they had a place to push them further.

In the beginning, there were no partition walls, so the group had to construct the entire space by dividing up the aircraft hangar-sized building by square footage based on what people could afford. This can-do spirit is infectious. It’s hard to imagine this model could ever happen in London. There’s something about being far from the centre of the market that provides more freedom. And it is freedom, in art as in life, that makes great things happen.

As I left Maple, I wanted to find out more about the art scene in Manchester. Is Maple an anomaly or are there others like it, hidden away? Are there writers documenting the work of these artists? And who for? (It should also be noted that The International 3, which gave Giovanelli her first show, closed in 2017 and with it the only commercial gallery in the city). The person to ask is Lauren Velvick, a director at Corridor8, the North West’s premier arts journal. Corridor8 has a fascinating and radical past, having been first established (as Corridor) by writer Michael Butterworth in the 1970s. They are now using what Velvick calls a “supported content” model.  “It became clear that there would never be a way to sell enough print magazines to fund a team”, she says, “but we also knew that galleries and arts organisations in the North struggled to get any coverage at all, let alone critical coverage, and were often using their marketing budgets to get writers up from London or to buy ads in London-based magazines… so the model we came up with offers an opportunity for a local writer to do that job for that same portion of marketing budget, and a record on our website in perpetuity.” It’s a creative model which also allows Corridor8 to run special projects like emerging writer residencies. “You get out what you put in, I suppose”, Velvick says. But Corridor8 isn’t the only platform in the region. Edited by Jo Manby and originally established as the house magazine of the now-defunct artist-led PAPER Gallery at Mirabel Studios, the Fourdrinier [four-drin-ee-ay] is an exciting online outlet dedicated to contemporary art in the North of England. Zines like STAT might offer up an ironic ‘anti-Manchester’ stance but do cover art, politics, and music in the city. And across the Manchester Ship Canal in Liverpool, The Double Negative publishes independent criticism, experimental texts and commentary on under-the-radar culture in the North West. Will Marshall, who used to co-run the artist-led space Bankley Gallery and the nomadic platform Scaffold Gallery, puts on inventive and multidisciplinary shows across the city. It feels like something is happening. As artists find London simply unaffordable, with few options for studio space (see my colleague Jacob Wilson’s important essay on this subject in these pages, from February) and freelance writers become untethered from full-time, secure jobs, Manchester’s innovatively sustainable models offer alternatives.

Alice Amati is another important figure in this world. Ten years ago, she studied curation at Manchester University (the other university), but the Rainy City was small enough for her to gravitate into the orbit of the students at the School of Art. She found her people. “I discovered a community where people were eager to share expertise, connections, ideas and resources”, she tells me, and “not just among their own group of friends or colleagues, but with anyone who was willing to learn and genuinely contribute to the shared purpose of growing the community’s visibility.” Amati soon realised that the lack of visibility was an advantage for making art in those heady early days, as artists developed their practice far enough away from market trends. They had nothing to cater to. But over time that benefit became an impediment to selling work.

Amati ultimately realised that if she was going to make it as a gallerist, she had to move to the capital. After seven years in London, Amati established a commercial gallery in Fitzrovia with her own name above the (impeccably International Klein Blue-coloured) door. But she didn’t forget her roots. One of her first shows was a group exhibition entitled ‘The Belly and The Guts’, which  featured her old friends Giovanelli, Harrison, Megannity, alongside fellow Manchester Art School graduates Fischer Mustin and Rafał Topolewski. While still a student, Mustin had shown in the inaugural Freelands Painting Prize open call in 2020. His work features disembodied heads and cartoon characters seemingly lost in an alternative universe. But there’s an atmospheric delight in the madness of painting that he shares with the Maple set. Topolewski has since also joined GRIMM and had a solo show, entitled ‘Slumber’, at the gallery’s flagship Amsterdam space last month. Topolewski’s tiny canvases move between dying flowers and tight crops of hands and faces: we want to know how they all fit together, but the group of artists in Amati’s show want to keep you guessing. Amati wanted to share some of the secrets she had chanced upon up north, and showcased what she believed was a “burgeoning movement in painting emerging from Manchester… while everything still felt too London-centric, we wanted to challenge this and provide the art world with a glimpse of the exciting new artists emerging from Manchester Art School.”

So, what was so special about Manchester Art School in the past decade? How and why has it produced so many stellar figurative painters that are now receiving international recognition? Could their success provide a formula for other emerging painters who are graduating from northern schools but who don’t want, or can’t afford, to find a studio or a hedge fund manager-cum-patron in London? The answer may well be yes, and the person to ask is the person who taught all these artists. Dr Ian Hartshorne is a man who, as Giovanelli  puts it, “people gravitate towards if they have a dark side.” At a time when identity politics and performative commitment is often the order of the day, Hartshorne champions a back-to-basics approach. “I foreground material over theoretical concerns, concentrate on surface value rather than superficial values”, he says, and “emphasise haptic, physical relationships to painting as opposed to ideological or sociopolitical ideas.” Hartshorne tells his students that they need to paint like the Old Masters in order to break the rules. He reminds them not to make a painting using a single brush: “it’s not what you paint, it’s how you paint it”, he often says. An inspiring teacher, Hartshorne believes deeply in painting’s capacity to make “a contribution to society.” But he had to kick hard against the pricks. This isn’t a country that believes much in the arts and artists anymore. 14 years of debilitating Tory austerity and the proliferation of jobsworth managers who have taken over from committed lecturers in the running of universities has seen many arts programmes closed down.

It’s lucky, then, for young artists that there are people like Hartshorne, Giovanelli, and Amatti, who believe in young artists and in the Manchester artistic community.  “This prejudice around ‘location’ was probably the biggest hurdle I faced early on and the one I’ve tried to battle the most, not least for the sake of other artists coming up now around me”, Giovanelli says. She isn’t just saying that about her own desire to support emerging artists. This impassioned trio (teacher, artist, curator) have recently established the Apollo Painting School, which seeks to “create an alternative and unique learning opportunity for emerging painters which holds at its core a wish to be accessible to anyone, regardless of economic background or circumstances.” It’s an exciting offer which is independent of the managerialism and bureaucracy of the university degree: an intensive three-month summer programme that includes crits and teaching in Manchester, online talks and a residency at a secondary arts school in Latina, Italy. Apollo is already the talk of the town and has received 200 applications for just five places. The five artists confirmed on the programme are: Ally Fallon (b. 1998, London, UK), Hannah-Sophia Guerriero (b. 2002, Oldham, UK), Isaac Jordan (b. 1998, Manchester, UK), Deborah Lerner (1989, Kings Lynn, UK), and Isobel Shore (b. 1999, Liverpool, UK).

Ever since academic artist Paul Delaroche saw a daguerreotype for the first time in 1840 and declared that “painting is dead”, the medium’s obituary has been hubristically written thousands of times. But if you step into any booth at Frieze, or take stock of what’s hot at the Venice Biennale, you’ll see that painting is very much alive and well. When Hartshorne set out to transform painting teaching in the North West, this wasn’t the case and he had to respond to the “deeply alarming incremental vanishing of teaching painting as a discipline within art schools.: Painting was passé: too sincere, too earnest, too old-fashioned. Assemblage, found objects and video art were then all the rage. “The artists in this feature are all managing to protect and advance painting in their different ways”, Hartshorne says: “they all share a core belief in its fundamental power, importance and goodness.” That’s true, but they all have a dark side, too.