The Modern Institute, Glasgow is showing an exhibition by Sue Tompkins at its Aird’s Lane space. Known for her fascination with language and personal expression, Tompkins’ new works are more abstract and amorphous than previous works, featuring thickly-layered paint ands PVA to convey wording dissolved into repetitive slants, diagonals and circular motions – with dots, circles and shapes coming to resemble flowers or celestial bodies. She edits as she works, applying, re-applying and revising layers, paring-back as she goes.

Sue’s a vocalist – former lead singer with indie band Life Without Buildings – and she incorporates performance into her gallery settings. The paintings surround typewritten works, paintings and performance texts in centrally-placed vitrines tracking her poetic rearrangements and distortions of conversational fragments and everyday phrases, one of which features the performance text for Country Grammar – one of her earliest pieces performed in a gallery context (2003).

Born in England, Tompkins is based in Glasgow and has exhibited across Europe and the UK, including at the Modern Institute, was nominated for a Beck’s prize, and won a Paul Hamlyn Award in 2011.

In addition, a stone’s throw away at the Modern Institute’s Osborne Street space (until 16th May) there’s an exhibition / installation about which only a little info has been released, at the request of the Berlin-based artist: all we have go on is a letter between Berlin artists Constantin Thun and Dominic Eichler and some intriguing photos of the installation, released by the gallery in March.