Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic A perky carnation towers above a blousy, salmon-pink rose, drooping morning glory and a bunch of grapes which has already relinquished one of its number, the flesh brown and oozing as it rots alone on the marble surface.Painted by 17th-century Dutch artist Simon Verelst, “Roses, Morning Glory, and a carnation on a marble ledge with some grapes” is a bittersweet celebration of our world in all its transient glory. As such, it typifies the genre that became known as still life since 1650.Boosted by the booming trade in flowers, still life painting emerged as a genre in the Low Countries. As an exhilarating exhibition, The Shape of Things: Still Life in Britain at Chichester’s Pallant House gallery, testifies, it also blossomed in the UK, particularly with the relocation of Dutch painters, including Verelst, to London. The Chichester show contains about 150 works from the 17th century to the present day, and although the journey is roughly chronological, judicious thematic groupings permit illuminating, past-meets-present exchanges. In the first room, for example, a traditional 17th-century vanitas by Dutch artist Edward Collier — another migrant to the UK — scoops up worldly treasures such as a globe, musical instruments and books to prophesy the evaporation of even our most enlightening endeavours. Next to it, the contemporary artist Gordon Cheung takes a more literal approach to decay by using ink-jet printing to transform an orthodox 17th-century still life of seafood and fruit into a waterfall of bleeding colours from which a single lobster claw and a peach, sliced open like a gaping mouth, seem to beg for succour.Before Cheung and his peers could take such liberties, a previous generation embarked on more respectful deconstructions. The shadow of Cézanne, whose reconsiderations of viewpoint and distance revolutionised the genre’s possibilities in the late 19th century, looms over Winifred Gill’s “Still Life with Glass Jar and Silver Box” (1914), as she flattens out her perspective so that objects appear on the verge of sliding off the tabletop.Gill was one of numerous women who worked in the genre. In part, their ranks swelled because women were not permitted to attend life drawing classes, thereby making it a challenge to paint human figures.Out of a healthy crop of female-authored works, a standout is “Black and White” (1932) by the underrated Dod Procter. Here, Procter finds a captivating tension between the sumptuous, tactile textures of an ermine robe, silk shawl and leather gloves flung haphazardly on a marble table and the austere shine of their monochrome tones.Two tiny grey spoons, frail as an old married couple, remain in isolation on one side of a tablecloth while a sturdy jug occupies the otherBy the 1940s and 1950s, British artists were catching up with the abstraction that had swept through European painting decades earlier. Cornwall, home to practitioners including Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson, Wilhelmina Barns-Graham and Patrick Heron, was a hub of experimentation. At Pallant House, you can sense Heron thinking on the canvas, messily yet fruitfully, as he shuffles and reshuffles tables, lamps, flowers and windows painted in thick, sloppy strokes on flat planes — “Still Life” (c1948-49) and “Round White Table: St Ives” (1953-54) — until the objects blur and dislocate, often seeming to hover between room and garden.In contrast to Heron’s disorder, the Zen-like clarity of two paintings by William Scott — “Still Life Variations 2” (1969), which pares various vessels down to featureless blue and white shapes against a pearly ground, and “Cup” (1974), which sets a bland white mug, slightly askew, alongside a collaged Gauloise packet — exemplify their painter’s success in his quest to find “beauty in plainness”.There’s nothing plain about the vision of Anwar Jalal Shemza. Sorely overlooked until recently, the Pakistani artist moved to London in 1956, a year before he painted the still life shown here whose glowing, airless geometries, in places resolving into identifiable vessels, fuse influences from Islamic pattern to Paul Klee. Shemza notwithstanding, its noticeable how often the best paintings exhibit judicious employment of pale hues. The luminosity and sense of space afforded by these tones intensify the uncanny charge that crackles through works that so often operate as meditations on mortality.Fine examples include Michael Ayrton’s “Black Still Life, Ram Skull III” (1959), which brings together an animal skull with an egg and a glass of flowers in a medley of whites — chalky, sulphuric, diaphanous — that also spatter the blackboard-like background. A different, more oyster-like sheen shimmers in “Cuddling Skulls” (1995), Maggi Hambling’s delicate response to a visit to Mexico where, as she put it, “life and death are cheek by jowl”.Yet part of still life’s seductiveness stems from its gift for expressing the frailty of existence with subtlety and sensitivity. An expert in oblique yet striking visual statements, Lubaina Himid offers an intriguingly mysterious image — “Jug and Two Spoons” (1989) — in which two tiny grey spoons, frail as an old married couple, remain in isolation on one side of a tablecloth while a sturdy jug occupies the other.As the pandemic took its ghastly toll, our corporeal fragility had never been more evident. With his signature laconic tenderness, German-born photographer Wolfgang Tillmans captures the curious blend of boredom and anxiety that characterised early lockdown in “Hampstead still life” (2020), as he shoots a bunch of freesias in near darkness alongside a furl of kitchen roll and an unwashed bowl against a window simultaneously opaque with rain and flushed with sunlight.Yet still life captures vitality as well as loss. In the final room, entitled Stillness and Reflection, such hopeful gestures are found in “Cat and Flowers” (1981), a watercolour by Elizabeth Blackadder which places a tortoise-shell feline, rotund and graceful, dozing among leggy lilies, translucent morning glory and vibrant amaryllis. Next to it, in her oil painting “Spent Stems” (2014), Charlotte Verity hints at transcendence by placing a tangle of dead twigs against a cloth of celestial blue.Although paintings predominate, no still life show would be complete without ceramics maestro Edmund de Waal, here represented by “September Song, II” (2020): two gilded porcelain tiles, a square of alabaster and a single snow-white porcelain cylinder huddled in the corner of a box shelf as if waiting for someone to rearrange them with more symmetry and grandeur. The insouciant placement heightens the work’s numinous shiver, as does the presence next door of Alison Watt’s oil painting “Wemyss” (2020). Spread out ceremoniously so each embroidered thread is rendered with scrupulous intricacy, the white handkerchief is a tribute to Watt’s observation that still life “doesn’t shout — it whispers”. As genres go, it’s the mouse that roars.To October 20, pallant.org.ukFind out about our latest stories first — follow FTWeekend on Instagram and X, and subscribe to our podcast Life and Art wherever you listen
