LONDON—Not only is Tomma Abts, the Kiel-born artist who now lives in London, the first painter to win the Turner Prize since Chris Ofili eight years ago, she’s also the first woman painter ever to win.

As soon as I saw her work—precise, abstract, obsessive, painted on tiny canvases all the same size (48-by-38 centimeters)—I hoped she would win, because the really interesting art being made in London right now deals with paint and how to paint without being retro-aesthetic.

Abts work, in particular, is difficult. You need to do a lot of work yourself to understand these seemingly repetitive little canvases—the sort of work you might put in to understanding the nuances and delights of an Old Master drawing.

As the Turner judges explained, they admired her works as “compelling images that reveal their complexity slowly over time.” And as Abts herself has said of her work: “The forms don’t stand for anything else, they don’t symbolize anything or describe anything outside the painting. They represent themselves.”

So no high concept here, just paint and intent.

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London’s Next Generation

The new generation of artists, I’ve noticed, is less concerned with conceptualizing or making a political statement—a fact that was very apparent at the ZOO show last autumn, where the most intriguing work was either painted or drawn.

One such artist, the much-younger female painter Katy Moran, recently created quite a stir with her exhibition at the always-interesting Modern Art gallery. Her first one-woman show was an immediate sell-out, and a display of her work at Art Basel Miami Beach last weekend led to that ultimate accolade: a very long waiting list.

Moran’s are very small-scale works using images originally sourced from the Internet, and they are quite beautiful. But again, to understand what’s going on here, you have to look very deeply into these tiny and exquisite paintings.

On the surface, they are lovely and very painterly, but look inward and hints of Fragonard, Romantic portraiture and the Baroque begin to reveal themselves in the accomplished swirls of acrylic paint. As do, eventually, the figures.

Though Moran and Abts both create luscious and extremely tactile art that forces viewers to work at understanding, they are not completely similar. Unlike Abts’ quirky dry, Art Deco geometrics, Moran’s tiny paintings are more about the process of painting.

Alex Gough is another young London painter to watch. His Finnish antecedents inform his overtly cool studies of pine trees in Lapland that are silhouetted against blue or moonlit skies, yet there is a historical hint of heat, like the high romance of Casper David Friedrich, in his work.

Here, the process of painting is less evident than in Moran’s works. Much of Gough’s process involves scraping paint off the surface of his canvases to create a luminous “shine-through” effect. But like Moran’s, his paintings have a quality of beauty and calm, which was very evident in Gough’s recent one-man show at The Arts Gallery, University of the Arts in London.

Already, savvy avant-garde collectors are queuing up for his works.

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Remembering Indica

Harking back to conceptualism for a moment, one of the most interesting shows on in London this winter is the revival of a legendary gallery that vanished 40 years ago. Yes, the Indica Gallery is back, courtesy of Riflemaker, the cutting-edge gallery in Soho curated by collectors Tot Taylor and Virginia Damtsa.

Indica was owned by John Dunbar (then married to that great survivor Marianne Faithfull) and International Times founder Barry Miles (always known simply as Miles). It existed for two years from November l965 to November l967—coincidentally in the same location as Jay Jopling’s new White Cube gallery—and was the epicenter of experimental art in the turbulent swinging ’60s. What makes it so fascinating 40 years later is that Indica was a major influence on today’s conceptual art scene.

It was here that John Lennon met Yoko Ono, and a young Marc Bolan volunteered to paint the gallery walls. Roman Polanski and Michelangelo Antonioni often dropped in for visits, as did William Burroughs, who lived around the corner.

“It wasn’t about showing the known names of the time,” said Dunbar. “We never showed anyone who was at all established, we just wanted to provide a platform for work that wasn’t pictures on walls. No one else in London offered that then.”

The three-month-long “Indica” exhibition at Riflemaker features works by each of the gallery’s original artists, including Yoko Ono, Takis, Gustav Metzger, Julio le Parc and Jesus Rafael Soto. And they have been placed against specially commissioned responses by some of London’s most interesting current young art stars, such as Conrad Shawcross, Jaime Gili, the Danish collective Janfamily and a new piece by the Boyle Family (patriarch Mark Boyle showed at Indica in l966).

For anyone interested in late 20th-century art history, this show is an absolute must. “Indica” only exists until the end of February, after which it will become a chapter in art history again. But if you can’t get to it, Riflemaker has produced a wonderfully quirky little book to coincide with the show that is fascinating and worth buying.