Historians fix paintings to their pasts. Museums monumentalize them. Conservationists try to pump life into worn out works. In all these acts, new marks or meanings are inevitably layered over paintings. They are like mummified painting-corpses with many tinted layers. By slicing off their edges, clues and residues of what has been concealed can show.

What might an aftermath of a long history of paintings that have been prematurely sentenced to death look like? Cosmeticised Paintings stages a scene of “corpses”, covered over by a white surface resembling embalming powder or a body sheet. Only by slicing off the painting’s edges does its coloured strata of lives and histories get revealed. These works make wry reference to the visual reduction in modernist monochrome and “white paintings”, and to the formalist frame- work for American Abstract Expressionism, with its emphasis on the “all-over” flat surface. In subversion, the paintings’ facades now obscure our view, splitting and dispersing our frontal gaze towards their subtly “bleeding” edges. This series can be understood as a deliberate attempt at intervening in and circumventing restrictive frameworks for painting.