In the delectably painstaking paintings of Sarah Miska, one finds a dash of the fetish. The whips, bridles and rippled silks of her horse and jockey paintings: all executed with this bewildering attention not just to detail but, it seems, to the very mechanics of attention itself. Miska muses over the tradition of equine paintings – and especially equestrian sports – as signifiers of class and thus division. She transports her viewer to a contest of seeing and believing. Seeing made easy because of the extraordinary palpability her microscopic marks fashion; believing made difficult because of the breviloquence her subject is forced to endure.

Her lens falls upon the strict rules of presentation associated with competitive dressage and showjumping. Miska is – just like the immaculately groomed horses she paints – making a comment about the type of people who are wealthy enough to participate in such a sport, and the vagaries of its ‘rulebook’. Bejewelled hair in tight buns, immaculately symmetrical cropped jackets and horses’ tails and manes evenly arranged in litanies of impeccable knots. The devil in her details – the loose strands of single hairs that perhaps indicate the passing of a different ride – that stare you in the face are always all too easy to miss when turning a blind eye on them. Miska’s clipped vision of bondage forces us to look; to see and to know, even when we don’t want to.