Ithell Colquhoun: an 'outlandish' exhibition

Ithell Colquhoun was an artist who "didn't sit still, visually or spiritually", said Phin Jennings in Time Out. Born in India, where her father worked as a colonial administrator, Colquhoun (1906-1988) moved to England as a child and studied painting at the Slade, where she was introduced to the "esoteric" beliefs that would shape both her life and her art.

Across her "sprawling oeuvre", Colquhoun experimented with a "wide gamut of spiritual, religious and formal ideas": she is generally associated with surrealism, but she also explored eroticism, the occult, Hindu Tantra, Christian mysticism and the Jewish Kabbalah to realise her bizarre pictorial visions. (Late in life she was ordained as a priestess of Isis.) Yet, her eye for composition remained "a constant", as did her talent for painting strange, often unsettling images.

This exhibition is a smaller version of a previous, "expansive" retrospective in St Ives, where she spent much of her life; but it still features 150 paintings and drawings, spanning Colquhoun's whole career. It is a wildly uneven experience – yet it contains many "impactful" moments, and provides a compelling introduction to her weird, wonderful world.

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The show takes Colquhoun's "obsession" with the occult seriously, said Alastair Sooke in The Daily Telegraph. It devotes much space to her designs for tarot cards, with wall texts going to great lengths to explain some of the "impenetrable" beliefs she harboured. At their best, the paintings have "a flaming, dream-like intensity". A case in point is the Salvador Dalí-inspired "Dance of the Nine Opals" (1942), in which "a ring of opalescent rocks" appears to revolve around "a golden tree of life before pink-tinged mountains".

Yet beyond the woo-woo wackiness, Colquhoun never really developed "a distinctive visual language" of her own, said Mark Hudson in The Independent. And some of what we see just isn't much good. "Attributes of the Moon" (1947), for instance, shows "a fantastical figure standing in a flesh-like cave"; it manages to evoke everything from pagan lore to the Virgin Mary, but still ends up looking like "a piece of clunky sci-fi illustration".

Colquhoun created some undeniably "dubious" paintings, said Laura Cumming in The Observer. "But the wildest works stand right out." Her most famous painting, 1938's "Scylla", is a bizarre "double take", in which you could be looking at a view of the sea between two coastal cliffs, or at "a submerged female body" (it was inspired by the sight of her legs in the bath). Better still are those to do with "bodily union". "Androgyne" (1941), in which two figures entwine to become four, is "startling and radiant". And best of all are the "Blakeian" "Diagrams of Love" (c.1940): "a winged blue figure flies up from a red chalice... eyes become breasts become flames become hearts". Uneven as Colquhoun was, this "outlandish" exhibition certainly has its moments.