Charlotte Keates’s tranquil residential scenes feature familiar tropes of mid-century modern art and architecture, but her use of surrealist perspectives provokes an unsettling feeling of disorientation. She creates an almost dreamlike sense of déjà vu with atmospheric tableaux that stems from both memory and imagination. Lacking any human figures, Keates’s paintings encourage the viewer to place themselves in the environments she depicts, as if entering a stranger’s empty home, unsure if and when they might return.

Marco Livingstone
Art Historian and Curator

“The deftness with which Keates varies her marks, overlaying passages of flat or mottled paint with features made with very fine brushes, is inextricable from the experience offered to the viewer of each painting as a series of decisions and interventions. Much art over the past half-century has relied upon immediacy and boldness of impact. While Keates’s paintings certainly have that quality in abundance, they offer far greater rewards the longer and the closer one looks at them. As one studies the trails of tiny leaves on the uppermost surface, one becomes privy to the sequence of mark-making that has shaped each painting over time.

One can no more articulate these spaces as rational than one can describe one’s dreams: the intensity with which certain features suggest a confrontation with reality makes the subsequent dismantling of that reality all the more confounding. Despite the intoxicating, joyful and unconstrained decorative appeal and undeniable lure of beauty in these pictures, there is an underlying sense of unease that guarantees a nagging understanding that what we are witnessing is an arrested moment within a perpetual sense of becoming.”

Sara Jaspan
Arts Writer

“Where are the people who would normally occupy such residential spaces? The creeping encroachment of plants and the very occasional discarded item (a book or a coffee pot) carry a hint of abandonment. The plants even have a vague gigantism to them, as they disrupt building foundations and begin to take possession (there is perhaps a tight-rope sense of both living in harmony with nature, and of being locked in an ongoing struggle with it), while the positioning of the furniture gives off an oddly staged or theatrical ring at times. I wonder what it would truly feel like to be inside one of these paintings for any length of time. Would the perfect stillness and utopian setting grow oppressive after a while? Or eerie? When would the spell begin to break?

These works present a very different, parallel line of inquiry into how we remember spaces. And they serve as a poignant reminder of the need to always question the surface impression of perfection and harmony that seemingly-idyllic worlds invite.” 

Jonathan Entwistle
Director and Producer

“Buildings are more than buildings and gardens are more than gardens. When done right, they are worlds. Designed, curated and created to live in and to be marveled at. Keates’ work showcases this essence. It’s simply a feeling brought on by the use of space. An intangible sense made real with colour and texture. A sense that must have dawned on everyone who has ever passed through California. It is pure world building. Creating spaces out of shapes; building volume from imagination; and channeling an architectural drawing practice that is laced with a laconic thought to real California Dreaming.”

Matt Price
Publisher and Curator

“At a certain moment things that appear architectural turn into purely graphic or decorative motifs with no discernible function in the space depicted. In this way Keates’s images become flights of fancy, leading us into the realms of utopias and dystopias, of ideal spaces and places that fall short of these ideals to varying degrees. While straight lines and acute angles characterise her images, there is also a very painterly, and specifically freely hand-painted, feeling to these works – the closer one gets, the more human they become.”

Exhibitions

2025

Atelier Aki

Art Central Hong Kong

2024

Atelier Aki Shanghai 
Arusha Gallery London
Arusha Gallery London
Group show

West Bund Art & Design
Sound Bridges - Solo show
Cho! Cho le! - Group show
Charlotte Keates, Margaret R. Thompson and Frida Wannerberger Edinburgh

2023

Arusha Gallery New York
Asia Art Center
Asia Art Center

You Carry Me - Solo show
Art Taipei
Tokyo Gendai

2022

Arusha Gallery Bruton
Mestre Projects - Bahamas
Asia Art Center
Asia Art Center
Asia Art Center Taipei
Arusha Gallery
Arusha Gallery

Thick Draws the Dark
Saudade - Charlotte Keates and Freya Douglas-Morris
ART021 Shanghai
Art Taipei
Narrative Minds - Group show
Masterpiece London
London Art Fair

2021

Cristea Roberts Gallery London
Arusha Gallery
Arusha Gallery London
Arusha Gallery London

Just what is it...? - Group show
The Armory Show New York - Charlotte Keates and Norman Gilbert
A Constant Hum - Solo show
Safe as Milk - Group show

2019

Christies Charity Auction London 
Arusha Gallery Miami
Arusha Gallery London

Art on the Mind
PULSE Miami - Group booth
London Art Fair

Press

Charlotte and her work have featured in and on the cover of:
Architectural Digest
Racquet magazine
American Short Fiction

Keates has also been featured and written about in:
The Times
The Evening Standard
The Financial Times
Fused Magazine
Lula Magazine
House and Garden
Scottish Homes and Interiors
Harpers Bazaar
AnOther Magazine
BLOUIN
House and Garden Australia
Wasted Talent
Juxtapoz

©CHARLOTTE KEATES

Enquiries
CharlotteKeatesArtist@gmail.com
Instagram | @CharlotteKeates