Better than I expected, worse than I hoped
Lucy Neish
Night Café is pleased to introduce 'Better than expected, worse than I hoped', a solo exhibition of paintings and drawings by Lucy Neish, on view from March 13 to April 11, 2026, at 162 New Cavendish Street. To accompany the exhibition, a book with the same name has been published, featuring an interview with the artist, a text by writer Billy Parker, and a preface by Maribelle Bierens. The exhibition begins from the premise that memory does not reproduce moments as they happened. Instead, it is continuously edited and structured, replayed selectively while gaps are filled with fabricated fragments. Lucy Neish has meticulously kept written records, photographs, screenshots, and recordings for years, yet even these careful archives cannot prevent details from slipping or being replaced. When she recreates these records in her paintings and drawings, this slippage becomes central, loosening the grip on a stable or singular version of reality.
The places Neish depicts form the cornerstones of her everyday life, including the churchyard behind her home, a pool in the park at the top of the hill, a view from a hotel room in Tokyo, and flowers on the communal studio bathroom window. By returning to these locations, the paintings map the physical boundaries of her daily routine. Neish works in densely layered, low contrast compositions that require slow and sustained attention. This method runs counter to the rapid pace at which images circulate today, where thousands pass before our eyes each day across phones, laptops, televisions, and messaging platforms. In Neish’s practice, images are not quickly consumed and discarded. Instead, they are revisited, prolonged, and examined through a process of close observation.
Discrepancies inevitably arise when an image is translated into paint, and again when these moments are handed to the viewer. Several works in the exhibition trace these shifts across different scales and settings, from the large landscape 'St Giles', based on a photograph of the churchyard behind the artist’s house, to 'Ruskin Pool', which captures the reflective surface of water at dusk. 'View from APA' depicts the urban geometry seen from Neish’s hotel room in Tokyo, while another painting enlarges flowers beyond life size, isolating them against a textured ground. Four small graphite drawings of rabbits extend this attention to detail, rendered with careful precision while their titles reveal unexpected origins. Together the works are autobiographical in character, yet they also point to the instability of recollection. Even the most attentive observation cannot fully preserve a moment, and the paintings embrace the slippage that occurs between experience, memory, and image.