Can an exhibition be at once hubristic and timid? Rooney’s broad-stroke, bold colour abstract oils claim their space in the galleries without hesitation. A “family” of canvases on which the artist is said to have worked for a year makes a run for the prime spots under the skylights. They bear the crusty traces of a painterly battle: long lines applied at right angles as though in a feat of angry desperation. A mostly blue mural wraps another space from floor to ceiling, leaving the eye no respite. It merely magnifies the gestures from the smaller tableaux, as though the same artist now suffered from gigantism.

For all this bravado, Rooney’s compositions offer only a very surface experience of abstraction. Seen through a tight squint, her images pay lip service to Water Lilies or the Starry Night. But the artist knew that every abstract image ever made does the same just as well. Not even the gratuitous dance performance commissioned for the mural and shown in the exhibition as a video “activated” these paintings the way Rooney says in another film they deserve.