Jon Cattapan in 2026

The War at Home: Jon Cattapan drawings and paintings
28.02. - 21.03.2026

Jon Cattapan’s new body of drawings and paintings examine how perception shifts under conditions of restriction and uncertainty, holding crisis in a space of unresolved tension.

“In this exhibition I wanted to bring together several bodies of work made during and around a period of profound social and psychological disruption. Containment Suite, Remission Stories, and Covid Times are sets of drawings that share a concern with how bearing witness, memory, and perception operate under conditions of restriction, uncertainty, and heightened awareness.

The drawings emerge from a practice long interested in systems of observation, surveillance, and mapping, but here those concerns are refracted through the strange lived experience of lockdowns, the saturation coverage of world conflicts, and the quiet intensity of domestic and urban isolation. Lines accumulate, overlap, and hesitate; figures and spaces appear only partially resolved, as if caught between presence and erasure. Drawing becomes a way of thinking through instability rather than describing it. Figures being ‘trapped’ is a recurring theme and functions partly as visual remembrance and partly as an evolving marker of thought—words encountered, misheard, or internalised during a time when official language attempts to contain behaviour and emotion. Authority and fragility co-exist.

Remission Stories and Containment Suite both draw upon displacement and conflict narratives, not as directly observed accounts but as personal and provisional imaginings —moments of pause, hope, or reprieve. Meanwhile, the fragments that make up Covid Times reflect the ambient atmosphere of the pandemic: the compression of space, the distortion of time, and the persistent almost paranoid sense of being observed.

The drawings and paintings I have made in this exhibition might best be thought of as registering the process of hesitation, exploration, hesitation, exploration and so on. Rather than offering resolution, the works propose a space for tenuous reflection on how crises are absorbed into our everyday perception, how language mediates experience, and how images can sometimes hold uncertainty without seeking to stabilise it.”