In her first solo exhibition in London, This Time Before Tomorrow, internationally recognized painter Calida Rawles presents a new body of work that explores cycles of time and human experience. In her signature, hyperrealist paintings, serenely-composed figures wade and float in water. The liquid element, for Rawles, is a charged substance that reflects and refracts issues of race, power, and access. Often dressed in solid-colored garments that fold and billow in response to water’s force and movement, her figures flourish in imperceptible moments of submersion and release. Alternately, the face acts as a window into the subject’s soul. In this new suite of six paintings, water is a container for the ebbs and flows that define contemporary global life. The detailed faces typical of Rawles are absent, and the moments of suspension that have become hallmarks of the artist’s work take on deeper meaning. This Time Before Tomorrow comes on the heels of Rawles’ first solo museum exhibition, Away with the Tides, which debuted at the Pérez Art Museum Miami in late 2024 before traveling to the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art in 2025, as well as her inclusion in the 12th Berlin Biennale in 2022.

In This Time Before Tomorrow, there are no identifiable figures and time does not travel in one direction. Broken, disjointed, murky, upside-down bodies represent the feeling of being knocked off one’s axis, and hyperrealist representation dissolves into fabulism. The paintings picture the liquid and solid contours of the “in-between,” muddying the boundaries between the mundane and the extraordinary by enfolding fantastical, supernatural elements into everyday life. Where and how do we locate ourselves and each other in times of unease and upheaval? What are the consequences of totalizing neglect and frenzy? How much is too much? Rawles answers these questions with play and speculation. Her new works dive more deeply into color theory, asserting her expertise as a colorist; her experiments with both color and chiaroscuro define the buoyancy and stagnation that imbibe the bodies that float, sink, and fold into one another. Strong contrasts of dark and light color, largely within a tertiary palette, create atmospheric volume, depth, and drama. Gestural brushstrokes and depictions of movement mirror states of matter as well as liquid and solid states of being. Blurring the line between hyperrealist figuration and surrealist abstraction, the darkness of the palette personifies the weight of the present while the veil of the water becomes a prism and conduit for other worlds and galaxies.