Gabriel Levine Brislin

Fullerton’s portraits question what it means to be represented, by whom and to what end Joma Ahmadi (Afghanistan), Asylum Seeker, Hilltop Hotel, Carlisle, 2025, oil on linen, 45 × 60 cm. Courtesy the artist For over two decades, Glasgow-based painter Michael Fullerton has brought an analytic, conspiratorial edge to the most conservative of artforms: traditional portraiture.

The artist’s wonky, playful paintings hide within them a layer of existential ambivalence A key motif of Mirror Matter, Philadelphia-based painter Aubrey Levinthal’s largest UK exhibition to date, is the humble Tupperware. In one portrait a tub of plain penne is held by a woman slouching in a chair before an unfinished canvas, her large eyes lost in thought. The last strand of spaghetti curls limply in its transparent container at the edge of the still-life Studio desk (2025).

The artist proposes an expanded theatre where light is the principal performer In his lecture series The Empty Space (1968), theatre director Peter Brook argued that the only ‘interesting difference between the cinema and the theatre’ was that cinema ‘flashes onto a screen images from the past’, whereas theatre ‘always asserts itself in the present’.