Cristina Ghetti, Ima Picó, Silvia Lerín, Lada Wilson and Sam Owen Hull come together in an exhibition where colour, geometry, material and movement become ways of seeing, feeling and thinking.

There was something immediately joyous about Shapeshifters. In an exhibition devoted to abstraction, it would have been easy for the work to become overly serious, theoretical or formally austere. Instead, what pulled me in was its sense of play: five artists approaching shape, colour and form with great care and intelligence, but without becoming rigid or doctrinaire.

The exhibition, held in Cambridge in April, brought together Cristina Ghetti, Ima Picó, Silvia Lerín, Lada Wilson and Sam Owen Hull, five artists whose practices are very different but who share an interest in the possibilities of abstraction.

What emerged was less a single statement about abstraction than a conversation between distinct artistic languages.

Colour is perhaps the most immediate point of connection. There is a remarkable generosity of colour throughout the exhibition, but none of the artists uses it in quite the same way. Each pays close attention to shape, geometry, rhythm and structure, yet each arrives somewhere entirely different. The result is a curious balance of harmony and dissonance. The works belong together, but they do not resolve themselves into sameness.

That tension is invigorating.

The title Shapeshifters becomes increasingly appropriate as you move through the exhibition. Shape is never simply shape. It shifts according to colour, material, scale, movement and context. And, importantly, it shifts according to the viewer.

Abstraction in motion

Cristina Ghetti’s work immediately draws the eye into this territory of perceptual instability. Her practice has roots in Op Art and kinetic art, but there is nothing nostalgic about it. Her precisely constructed surfaces create optical movement, asking the viewer’s eye and body to continually adjust.

Her contribution to the exhibition also includes a mesmerising abstract film documenting her artistic process. The film is quiet and contemplative, with a meditative concentration that gradually draws you away from the physical space of the gallery and into another mental space altogether. It becomes almost an extension of the paintings: less something to watch than something to enter.

Ima Picó takes a different route. Her geometry is more contained, her structures more architectural, but the work is no less alive. Repetition and colour create rhythms that seem at once ordered and playful. There is a sense of precision, but never sterility. Her work demonstrates that geometric abstraction can be both disciplined and sensuous.

If Ghetti makes us question what we are seeing, Picó makes us conscious of how the elements of an image occupy space and relate to one another.

The material body of painting

Silvia Lerín’s work introduces a completely different dimension: texture.

Her paintings are difficult to describe simply as paintings. They occupy that delicious territory where a work of art seems to be asking you to reconsider the category you have just assigned to it. The canvas folds, wrinkles, gathers and becomes almost bodily. Colour is not simply applied to a surface; it seems embedded in a material process.

Looking at Lerín’s work is almost a tactile experience. You feel texture with your eyes.

There is something wonderfully discombobulating about this. Painting normally depends upon the illusion of depth, but Lerín makes the physical surface itself impossible to ignore. The material becomes the image.

And this, for me, gets to the heart of what art can do. It can interrupt the automatic process of looking. It can make us conscious of our own perception.

The shape of a journey

Lada Wilson introduces another shift, moving between visual art, geometry, language and film.

Her work uses geometric structures and materials to suggest signs, fragments and systems of communication. But the most unexpected element of her contribution is her film, which moves away from the contemplative abstraction of Ghetti and becomes a genuinely narrative piece of video art.

Here we accompany Wilson herself as performer on a mysterious journey through a stark and compelling landscape.

The film has a cinematic quality that brought to mind, at certain moments, the desolate opening of Barbara Loden’s Wanda, and also Monica Vitti’s extraordinary presence in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Red Desert. These are not direct quotations, but atmospheric echoes: a solitary figure moving through an environment that seems psychologically charged, where landscape becomes an extension of inner experience.

The result expands the idea of what “shape” might mean within the exhibition. Shape is no longer confined to the canvas. It becomes movement, landscape, narrative and the human body moving through space.

Following the trace

Sam Owen Hull takes abstraction somewhere more intuitive and organic. Her forms suggest roots, maps, subterranean systems and invisible constellations. There is a sense of something moving beneath the surface, something that is being discovered rather than constructed.

Her work provides an interesting counterpoint to the more overtly geometric practices elsewhere in the exhibition. Where Ghetti engages perception, Picó explores geometric structure, Lerín engages the physicality of material and Wilson expands the sign into language and narrative, Owen Hull seems interested in trace: the mark left by something that has moved through space.

This gives the exhibition another kind of rhythm, one that feels less architectural and more bodily or geological.

Shapeshifting the viewer

What I found most compelling about Shapeshifters was ultimately not any particular definition of abstraction, but the way the exhibition made abstraction feel open, playful and alive.

The five artists are clearly engaging with a long history of abstract art. You can feel the presence of Op Art, geometric abstraction, material painting, gestural abstraction and experimental film. But the work isn’t trapped by those histories Instead, the artists take what they need and move somewhere else.

The exhibition text by Tony Calderon describes the works as a “polyphonic chorus”. That seems right, although I would add that this is a chorus in which nobody is singing the same note. The pleasure comes from the relationships between the voices.

And perhaps this is where the title becomes most interesting Shapeshifters isn’t simply about artists who manipulate shapes. It is about what happens when shapes begin to manipulate us.

Moving through the exhibition, I became increasingly aware that I wasn’t simply experiencing the shapes. The shapes were reshaping my experience of the exhibition, altering my sense of colour, space, movement and even my own position within the gallery.

That, ultimately, is what abstraction at its best can do.

It doesn’t tell us what to see. It invites us to shift the way we see.

Shape Shifters was  in Cambridge. The exhibition ran from April 20 to June 26, 2026, at the Alison Richard Building