Pusher Gallery is pleased to announce its new exhibition, Nights at the Circus, at Greatorex Street, London. The show features works by Gala Hills (b. 2001, Liverpool), Loveday Pride (b. 2001, Wiltshire), Maisie Goodfellow (b. 2002, Edinburgh), and Sophia Missaghian-Schirazi (b. 2001, Liverpool), all recent graduates or students of the Ruskin School of Art, Oxford. Gala is currently studying for her MA in painting at the Slade.

With joy, with hope, with excited apprehension, a collaboration between four artists emerges: a shimmering display of paintings, drawings, costumes; an exhibition that in its brevity, and in its bravado, draws from the great circus traditions and tilts its jaunty hat to fleeting fairs and fetes.

Each artist, like acts coming together to create the total spectacle, has approached the show along their own path. From inside her studio, an impromptu tent decorated with garlands and lights, Gala shifts through Lewis Carroll’s photographs of melancholy Victorian children. Their soft lips and large foreheads provide the recurring features of Gala’s protagonists: precocious girls with defiant stares and moody schoolboys swaddled in heavy, patterned fabric. Occupying Bloomsbury interiors, they are accompanied in their feral activities by a menagerie of fauna: tricksy monkeys and doleful fish. Their quintessential Englishness, which oscillates between Edwardian sultriness and modish style, is both delighted in and scrutinised, like a child intrigued by a squashed butterfly.

As Gala looks curiously, Loveday’s sight flashes through and up to the dazzling heights of the trapeze artist. Her mural-like paintings on plastic dustsheets are of the figure in motion, with light penetrating the watery forms of twisted divers, dancers and acrobats. In others, her characters are on parade in psychedelic compositions and wonder-filled landscapes: sumptuous colourways are indulged in but, like the best confectionary, always leave you wanting more.

A different kind of character can be found in Sophia’s works: her mascot is not a juvenile delinquent or spinning showgirl, but a flaming swan. Gliding, skating, her figures embody a peripheral, dissolving state as much as the bleeding colours on her unprimed canvases do. Some of her forms are knock-out in their clarity – jagged stars, bold circles, floral motifs – while others melt in your mouth: toads sneak upon an elaborate jousting tent encircled by trees, hurried marks and dripping paint.

But it is through this hazy sunset fog that Maisie rushes in headfirst, single rose dripping from the barrel of a cherry-red shotgun. The campiness of retro sci-fi is tampered only by deadpan comedic timing, akin to a ba-dum-tish cymbal smash off stage left. Her presence in the show is sure to be felt in more than simply the objects on view.

Throughout the kaleidoscope of colour and light that seeks to entice the senses, another, glittering thread emerges in the collected works: in the handling of materials a commitment to making comes to exist as a radical care, both timely and timeless: care for the discipline of creating, and for those we choose to create alongside.