Milly Thompson, who has died of a brain tumour aged 58, played an active role in British art over the past 20 years, both as a member of the artists’ group BANK and then as an independent painter, writer and performer. Through all her work, with touch, line and words, she conveyed a consistent sense of anger.
BANK emerged in the early 1990s, at a time when contemporary art was starting to be celebrated in the UK, and particularly in London, as perhaps the most fashionable artform of all. The group’s frenetic, provocative activities, from its BANK tabloid publication, with headlines such as “Galleries all owned by rich people – SHOCK”, to its FaxBack Service, where self-aggrandising, mystifying gallery press releases were proof-read and faxed back covered in red pencil, meant that they maintained a constantly irritating presence in an increasingly uncritical art world, and were an antidote to a media increasingly concerned with the lifestyle of the so-called Young British Artists who were emerging at that time.
As Thompson said in an interview in 2013, “I think BANK sensed the coming era and though we couldn’t know the shape of it … the increasing ‘professionalisation’ of it, the YBAs were starting to attract bigger prices than Helen Chadwick or Tony Cragg or Richard Wentworth ever did in the 1980s, [and] the stupidity of ‘Cool Britannia’ was hanging over everyone. There was a feeling that something was going to change, and I think we were making work about that without quite knowing it.”
A core member of BANK from 1994 to 2003, Thompson went from the buzz of working collectively on apparently thrown-together exhibitions and happenings to enjoying painting alone. Her 2016 manifesto, I Choose Painting, both sincere in content while parodying the grandiose male artist statement, explained the potential that Thompson believed remained within the medium: “My thoughts are only of escape, simplicity, sensuality.”
Thompson’s paintings contain, as she did in real life, an apparently relaxed but nonetheless determined line. About the female experience, from a feminist viewpoint, the images carry a touching, everyday sensibility, with graphic lines drawn in translucent paint bubbling with ease.
In works such as Nor Playing the Flute (2018), and Helian In Her Garden (2016), middle-aged women are depicted relaxing and enjoying themselves. The subjects, painted in a way no more studied than the hasty application of make-up, carry a nonchalance both inside and out, seemingly unbothered about remaining attractive to anyone other than themselves.
Scuba Sauvage Azure Bleu (2021), painted in a range of media on vintage linen, shows a woman decorated by a variety of props. For The Moon, the Sea, and the Matriarch (2019), a commission that “celebrated the pleasures, woes, cellulite, and desires of menopausal, older and middle aged women”, at Timespan, a cultural organisation in Helmsdale, north-east Scotland, Thompson showed her series of Cougar paintings, as well as initiating performances by women in the community, and created, with the perfumer Eliza Douglas, a perfume collection, Shatavari, with three scents, Proposition, Invisible and Volatile.
Born in Bloomsbury, central London, to Susan (nee Brammall), who became a dress designer, and Julian Thompson, an architectural modelmaker for Ove Arup, Milly grew up in Maida Vale, with her sister, Eleanor. She went to Pimlico comprehensive, now Pimlico academy, leaving in 1982, and worked as a theatrical prop-maker and gardener for a year before doing an art foundation course at Central School of Art and Design.
She did her BA in painting at the Slade School of Fine Art, where she became particularly influenced by the sculptor Bruce McLean, who had just arrived as a tutor. While there, she rode a motor bike, wore full leather motorcycle gear, and was considered as somewhat of a provocateur by fellow students. She graduated in 1989.
Bedwell and Russell had been organising shows together since 1991, the first in a disused Barclays bank in Lewisham, south London, hence the name. In 1993 the pair, along with David Burrows and Andrew Williamson, invited Thompson, whom Russell had known at the Slade, to participate in their Big Painting Show, at a disused goods yard at Kings Cross. She obliged, and became a vital part of what was to become the more defined group (Burrows left in 1995).
BANK curated approximately 20 shows, in galleries ranging from their base in Underwood Street, Shoreditch (later titled Galerie Poo Poo), to Tate Modern, the ICA and the Whitechapel Gallery; published around 35 editions of the BANK tabloid newssheet; and sent back corrected versions of more than 300 press releases to galleries such as Stephen Friedman, and Greene Naftali. Fundamentally against the mystification of art practice, Burrows wrote in Art Monthly in 1999 that the group provided “the other history of modernism, the history of avant-garde negation and provocation of bourgeois art … [a refusal] to make their artwork for the institution of art”.
BANK’s final show with the core three members was at Anthony Wilkinson gallery in 2002. Bedwell and Thompson showed together for the last time at Store, London, and The Suburban, Chicago, in 2003. The BANK archive, including copies of the tabloid and FaxBack, are in the Tate collection.
Teaching from 2000 on the painting MA at the Royal College of Art, and in fine art at Goldsmiths, University of London, till 2021, Thompson remained influential on a generation of emerging artists.
In 2002 she received, as a member of BANK, the Paul Hamlyn Foundation award. Individually, she was a recipient of the Sargent award at the British School at Rome in 2005. Solo exhibitions include Late Entry at Peer UK, London (2008), and Savoir Faire at Focal Point Gallery, in Southend, Essex (2009). Her work was included in last year’s London Open at the Whitechapel Gallery.
Thompson is survived by her husband, Robert Jacobs, whom she married in 2019, and by her mother, father and sister.
