I am the curator of this exhibition, though the word curator feels a little inflated here. At the private view last night, several people congratulated me on the pairing of Marilyn and Ellie - warmly, earnestly - but the praise felt unearned, like being commended for thinking of pairing tonic with gin. The artists have done the real work here. I invited Ellie MacGarry to Marilyn Hallam’s studio, showed her the paintings, set out the shape of an idea, and asked her to choose a selection of Marilyn’s works to respond to. Ellie’s choices were exact and thoughtful - as was the work she then made. My job was simply to help her curate the hang. With that in mind, I feel able to approach What Remains of the Day as a near-spectator - close enough to know what I’m looking at, distant enough to see what the show is actually doing.

Walking into What Remains of the Day at General Assembly, the surprise is not the intergenerational pairing. It’s the collapse of time. The paintings span more than forty years, yet the room doesn’t feel like a negotiation between past and present. Instead, it reads as a single, coherent conversation about looking - how we see, how we enter a space, and how a painting quietly arranges the terms of attention.

Marilyn Hallam, born in 1947, has spent decades painting the interior as a site of intelligence rather than sentiment. Her rooms unfold slowly. A fridge door catches the light. A figure drifts in from the next room. Fabrics soften the architecture. She is a painter of thresholds - not dramatic narrative thresholds, but the small, human ones: walking from one room to another, pausing before a window, noticing how light changes the temperature of a wall. These are scenes built through drawing, tracing, reconstruction and careful design. Her surfaces are gentle but never loose; the colour is high-key but controlled. Looking at a Hallam is like reading a paragraph written with absolute clarity - not decorative clarity, but structural clarity. Every hinge and pause has been worked through.

Opposite her, Ellie MacGarry’s paintings return to similar structures - thresholds, interiors, bodies partly seen - but reduce the room to essential elements. A cropped torso, parted buttons, ribbons and ties suspended in ambiguous air. MacGarry’s restraint is deliberate; what she leaves out is often more charged than what she shows. Her figures occupy the blurred edge between public and private selves. They reveal and conceal at the same moment, and the compositions carry a kind of emotional pressure: a stillness that is anything but passive.

Pairing these two artists could easily have tilted toward a tidy narrative about mentorship, or inheritance, or the vague idea that painters of domestic scenes have some intrinsic affinity. But this show is doing something subtler. It asks whether painting’s so-called “contemporaneity” is really about novelty at all. Hallam’s earliest works here are roughly forty years old. Go back forty years from those, and you land in the 1940s - the final embers of European modernism, a moment still wrestling with Cézanne’s legacy, with pictorial construction, with what painting is supposed to do. Hallam’s recent surge of attention suggests she never left that conversation. Or, perhaps more accurately, the conversation never resolved itself.

Modernism, for all its supposed breaks, was always concerned with structure: with how a painting is built, how colour holds or resists form, how a picture organises perception. Hallam’s work sits squarely in that lineage. She aligns herself with no movement, yet her approach feels anchored in that older, more exacting idea of painterly thinking. It lends her work a contemporary crispness, not because it chases the present, but because the present has looped back to questions modernism left open. The younger generation - MacGarry included - often returns to structure, edges, reductions, and material intelligence as a way of cutting through noise. Seen this way, Hallam doesn’t look contemporary despite her age; she looks contemporary because the concerns she has sustained are, once again, the concerns painters share.

MacGarry’s work illuminates this. She strips the room to its minimum architecture, yet keeps the charged threshold where identity shifts. Her compositions echo Hallam’s interest in how a room holds thought - but here the body becomes the architecture. Fabrics behave like structural elements; the frame itself becomes a threshold. Modernist reduction re-enters the scene through an image of the body rather than the window or the table. It’s a different language, but the same grammar.

What the show avoids - mercifully - is generational piety. There’s no narrative of influence, no pressure to read MacGarry as Hallam’s successor or foil. Instead, the exhibition acknowledges the simple fact that good painters, regardless of age, are often preoccupied with similar problems. How do you capture the weight of light? How do you depict an interior that is not merely a setting but a state of mind? How do you distil the emotional residue of the everyday without sentimentalising it?

The spaciousness of the hang helps. Nothing feels crowded; each work holds enough air to register its own logic. You can step from a 1980s Hallam to a 2025 MacGarry without adjusting your visual tempo. Both reward slow, attuned looking. Both operate with an understated confidence that resists the pace of contemporary culture. And both approach intimacy not as a spectacle but as a mode of attention.

In a moment where art discourse often emphasises novelty, youth, disruption, there’s something refreshing about a show that frames time differently. It proposes continuity rather than rupture, resonance rather than competition. It suggests that the contemporary is not a generation but a condition - a shared field of problems and possibilities that painters enter at different moments in their lives.

What Remains of the Day is a quiet exhibition, but quiet in the most productive sense. It trusts the work. It trusts the viewer. And it reminds us that painting, at its best, isn’t a record of the moment but a record of looking - a practice capable of stretching across decades without losing its edge.

What Remains of the Day: Marilyn Hallam and Ellie MacGarry - In Dialogue

12 - 27th November 2025

General Assembly 12 Saint George Street, London, W1S 2FB

A final note: A quiet thanks to Matt Lippiatt, whose conversation at the private view last night nudged several of these thoughts into place.