Methodical Process brings together three artists whose practices explore the repetition of gesture as a daily process, revealing how it constructs images. While Marie Gyger approaches repetition through a structured and conceptual reflection on the value of work and labor, Linda Bell and Nnena Kalu engage in more spontaneous and obsessive modes of production. This dimension remains implicit rather than explicitly theorized in the two British artists practices, while the consistency and intensity of their work echo, in another register, the questions raised by Gyger concerning labor, productivity, and the value of artistic practice in a society defined by work.

Together, these approaches reveal not only shared working processes but a deeper commitment to method — a sustained and repetitive structuring of time, gesture, and materiality. Though shaped by radically different social and artistic contexts, these artists approach creation as an ongoing negotiation between control and instinct, structure and flow. Gyger’s art makes this control explicit as a subject of the work, while Bell and Kalu develop forms of organization that emerge through repetition itself. Their practices are not governed by chance, but by a persistent effort to order, reorganize, and reconfigure materials — and, through them, to propose alternative ways of structuring the world and record the passage of time.

The use of modest materials – newsprint paper in Gyger’s work, fragments of fabric and plastic in Bell’s, and found sheets of paper in Kalu’s – refocuses attention on the repeated gesture itself, on its duration and accumulation, rather than on the quality or rarity of the materials.

Human being distinguished themselves by using repetitive processes to perfect their tools, but also to develop a visual art as early as in cave painting. The question of copying as an educational and evolutionary process is also central to human development. Although Western art of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has often been framed around the idea of rupture and the iconic gesture, artists have equally relied on repetition, both as a method and as a subject. From Josef Albers to the canvases of Agnes Martin, repetition remains a fundamental operative principle.

Nnena Kalu – Body in Rhythm, Line in Motion | Turner Winner 2025 | Tate

Turner Prize 2025 winner, Nnena Kalu (*1966) lives and works in London (UK). She has been a resident artist at ActionSpace’s Studio (a studio that hosts artists with learning disabilities) since 1999. Spanning more than two decades, her practice has developed with a singular interest for materiality and process, receiving growing critical acclaim in recent years. Working through drawing, sculpture, and installation, Kalu engages in ambitious explorations of space, texture, and scale. Repetition is the driving force behind her work.

In the exhibition Methodical Process, we present a group of works on paper, in particular a large diptych in which Kalu uses ink, pen, graphite, or chalk on layered paper. Her drawings emerge from a rhythmic, sustained gesture that generates spiraling, overlapping lines. Drawn while standing directly before the sheet, these swirling marks form highly abstract compositions whose force and singular expressiveness give the works a powerful and compelling presence. The works register the physical relationship between the body and the surface: the reach of the arm, the circular movement of the gesture, and the tension between the scale of the body and that of the sheet become integral to the formation of the image.

Recent exhibitions include Arcadia Missa (London, 2025); Kunsthall Stavanger (2025); Infinite Drawing (Deptford X, London, 2022); and Studio Voltaire Elsewhere (London, 2020). Her work is held in the Tate Collection, London (UK) and the Arts Council Collection (UK).