27 Bell Street, NW1 5BY, London, United Kingdom
Open: Tue-Sat 11am-6pm and by appointment
Thu 19 Nov 2026 - Sat 13 Feb 2027
27 Bell Street, NW1 5BY — Google
Tue-Sat 11am-6pm and by appointment
Artist: Christopher Le Brun
Lisson Gallery presents an exhibition of new works by Christopher Le Brun. Across an extensive sequence of canvases, the artist enacts a decisive shift towards representation following the abstract emphasis of his work of the past two decades. That abstract register – always a means of mediating between images and sensations – resolves into clear, cosmic visions of nature.
Le Brun’s long-time interest in the spatial and emotional possibilities of colour finds new focus in these scenes. Solar orbs glow amid fields of atomised colour, for example in the panoramic canvases Quarry (2026) and Press (Sun Notes IV) (2026). The sun, at once a source of light and a pictorial crux, is a recurring motif – transmuting at times into moons, planets, or other stars. Numerous works feature multiple suns, suggesting either a parallel cosmos or the passing of time.
In this way, the radical open-endedness of Le Brun’s abstract compositions persists. The figurative imagery of his work of the 1970s and ’80s, which often conveyed mythic or narrative subtexts, re-emerges in scenes that appear celestial and palpably physical by turns. The Chalk Pit (2026) re-envisions the South Downs as an outspreading landscape on an expansive scale, the stability of the rambling terrain offset by a sense of fracture or dispersal. A thicket of white at the centre of the picture suggests both an excavation and an outbreak of light.
In Pastoral (Numbered Landscape I) (2026), twin light sources hover in the top half of the composition – their doubleness introducing a subtle note of discord. Often, the distinction between earth and air itself suggests a kind of tension or incipient dissolution. In Act (2026), dark strokes hint at hard matter – solid ground – while dispersing at the boundary into brighter, airier colour. Such a transmutation of recognisable form into pure colour is discernible, too, in works such as the square-shaped Mariner (2025) where a nucleus of white pigment implies a light source refracted through a shimmering atmosphere, with an explicit reference to “the journeying moon” in S.T. Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”. Thrones (2025), has denser blocks of tone sit amid an indefinable space, as if light itself could be rendered as an image with shape and form.
The title of the exhibition, The Mind’s Weather, points to the vital role changeability plays in Le Brun’s paintings. Each picture is an evocation of inward experience as well an allusion to the visible, light-filled world. Through visions of landscapes that evoke mental as much as physical terrain, he continues to employ painting as a mode of reflection, by turns instinctive and intentional, aesthetic and emotional.
“Painting is physical but its intangible mystery feels metaphysical. By that I mean its presence conveys a sense of something or somewhere that is not here. It is naturally surrounded by thoughts and references, without need for explanation or justification. The beauty of the materials in unending combination is enough.”
The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue containing an essay by Barry Phipps: The Landscape Thinks Itself: Christopher Le Brun’s Recent Paintings.
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