As you look around, nature is undeniably present in Veronika Hilger’s paintings. We can soon spot the curve of a hill or a plant, the sky in that peculiar shade of violet-grey, the setting sun or the rising moon. There are also some buildings and figures, in various constellations, and those sounds of someone working alone in an upper room. But the weather, the weather is never quiet. Her paintings have all the strangeness of shuttered heat. As the temperatures rise in our darkened flats, catastrophe looms above us like a mudslide.

Her paintings have been described as ambiguous, and there are still many ambiguities to be found here, in this latest series of work. In one, moonlight seems to glisten on a drooping form, casting a shadow to the right. But this form is rooted in a flat space that both withdraws and reasserts its presence. A third form impossibly overlaps the second, a weightless mass of scraped-away paint. These ambiguities are not found but developed over long periods of…