Tanya LING UK, b. 1966

Indian born (Calcutta 1966) British artist Tanya Ling studied Fashion Design and Textiles at St Martins School of Art. Soon after graduating in 1989 Ling moved to Paris to work as a designer for Dorothee Bis and then for Christian Lacroix. On her return to London she set up a contemporary art project named Bipasha Ghosh with her husband William Ling and in 1996 produced her first exhibition of drawings in artist Gavin Turk’s studio on the Charing Cross Road, London. This exhibition led to a commission to make drawings for British Vogue. Over 50 of her drawings are housed in the Prints and Drawings collection at the V&A, London.

Her Line Paintings, characterised by a beautiful efficiency are made in one session with an apparent effortlessness and are never reworked. No two are the same. Powerful, beautiful, strong and tender all at once they describe form but after all our looking there is no discernible object. They scale up and scale down, move in and move out, dip, weave and swirl into and out of each other. They twist, turn and run and then slow down again. Drips are left to fall.
 
All the Line Paintings made since 2018 are named after fountains.

This first public appearance of the Line Painting idea took place at the Mayor Gallery and took the form of a mural that was in due course, smashed up and ground down by the demolition of 22A Cork Street, London pre-development. Their genesis, however, can be traced back to a textile design painted by Ling for the Louis Vuitton Cruise collection 2009.

Line Paintings have also appeared on a Fendi handbag, an Araks swimsuit and a large mural that formed the back drop to her sculpture show at Darbyshire framemakers, 2015. Sophie Hastings commissioned Ling for Art16 (London) to create a huge Line Painting in front of the art fair visitors and a single work was included in Simulation /Skin, Selected Works from the Murderme Collection at Newport Street Gallery in 2017.

 

Tanya Ling Studio