Georg Wilson: Dark Wonders

Georg Wilson, Vespertine (Thorn Apple), 2025, oil on linen

Until the other day I don't think I'd ever walked the length of Savile Row, a street that was once the byword for elegant English tailoring but which is now being infiltrated by art galleries - Hauser and Wirth at one end and at the other a space recently opened by Pilar Corrias. This feels like a former shop, with black and white tiles in the front and an arch at the back leading to a tiny room where - who knows? - maybe an old chap used to sit altering trousers for the gentry.

It's a space that seems designed to entice, which is something you probably wouldn't say about the paintings currently on display there. They are dark and spiky and strange. The visitor rushing in to capture an insta-hit or two will leave disappointed because these are paintings you have to spend time with. They reveal themselves slowly. Or to put it another way, they invade you gradually as the wriggling roots of the poisonous plants so lovingly drawn (and indeed cultivated) by Georg Wilson worm their way into the earth. 

An exhibition devoted to poisonous plants is a brave venture especially with the art business in the precarious state it is in. When I first saw some of Wilson's paintings a year or so ago I was struck both by their strangeness and their charm; the vision on display now is, by contrast, baleful, haunting. There's an intensity to these pictures of trees and plants that reminds me of Van Gogh sunflowers when you look at them properly, but Wilson's world (at least as seen here) is coloured more Kiefer. Muddy brooding nature only yards from the bright lights and bustle of Regent Street.

Georg Wilson, Host (Cuckoo Pint), 2025, oil on linen

Which isn't to say that this isn't a beautiful exhibition - it is. Each painting is exquisite, from 'Vespertine (Thorn Apple)' with its pallid clawed leaves to the madly flowing forms of my personal favourite 'Host (Cuckoo Pint)'. In this remarkable painting the red-berried stems of Cuckoo Pint/Lords and Ladies plants poke out from the forest floor, bright little points of danger surrounding a tree form (oak stump?) which is painted in writhing lines of subtly contrasting colours. From the still heart of the tree a dark-eyed creature stares out, part-human, part-tree spirit - recognisably a relative of the creatures currently filling the gallery at Jupiter Artland (where The Earth Exhales, Wilson's first solo museum show, is about to end), but almost hidden. 

Georg Wilson sees herself as part of an alternative landscape painting tradition which celebrates vision and imagination over property ownership and (by extension) factual representation. The world of dark wonder she conjures is one a child might experience playing in a ditch or straying from a family walk in the woods: natural forms up close, unfamiliar and unnamed, identified as much by scent or texture or the feelings they induce as by appearance. With notable exceptions (Paul Nash eg) this is an imaginative world that has been explored less by artists than by illustrators such as Arthur Rackham or his brilliant but little-known predecessor Eleanor Vere Boyle.

Georg Wilson, The Last Cy, 2025, oil on copper

 

Among British painters, Samuel Palmer is a sort of founding father of this alternative tradition, one of his achievements being to fuse homegrown Christian symbolic landscape (expressed poetically in Paradise Lost and prosaically in Pilgrim's Progress) with the Classical pastoral of Virgil. I can see Palmer in Wilson's trees (particularly in the beautiful miniatures of trees on copper) and also in her mark-making, which seems to have more in common with the patterning used by engravers (like Palmer) than with other painters. Wilson's larger paintings are alive with strokes and scratches, wiggles and whorls, decorative flourishes which also convey a sense of living, breathing nature. It's intoxicating.

Georg Wilson: Against Nature is at Pilar Corrias, Savile Row, London, until 7 March 2026