Vardaxoglou is pleased to present East and West, a solo exhibition of new paintings by British artist Lewis Brander (b. 1995), focusing for the first time on a selection of large-scale works completed between 2021 and 2025.

Lewis Brander has developed a group of paintings that draw together the traditions of landscape painting and abstraction. Painted from the vantage of his East London studio, the exhibition reflects his sustained engagement with the shifting presence of the sky. Thinking of the craft and placement of paintings as a form of poetry, the exhibition’s title refers both to the view from his studio window and to a wider dialogue between Western painting and new influences from South Asia. Although grounded in observation, these are not landscapes in the conventional sense. Instead, they translate light and atmosphere into expansive fields of colour. In doing so, Brander extends a lineage that runs from English Romanticism to twentieth-century American abstraction, while working these traditions for the present.

East and West also presents a more overtly figurative dimension of Brander’s painting, in new works of trees near the Regent’s Canal – specifically Vincent Terrace in Angel, Islington – the artist extends his engagement with the landscape through direct observation and reflects his sustained return to a small number of locations close to his studio. These new paintings show a heightened intensity, in part inspired by views from Whitechapel. There, the chromatic brilliance of South Asian textiles in particular has influenced works such as Wharf (2025) where juxtaposed tones of yellow and magenta function as both geographical signifier and atmospheric device.

In the exhibition, materiality also plays an increased role. For this body of work, Brander prepared several surfaces using traditional Renaissance techniques. These unstable grounds warp and resist, forming irregular surfaces that become integral to the finished image. The resulting textures recall weathered frescoes, inspired by his time living in Athens, and embody his view of painting as an imperfect object shaped by material processes.

While Brander’s palette remains rooted in the natural world, East and West is his reimagining of landscape painting. Combining both observation and abstraction, his works allow colour, surface, and atmosphere to converge, carrying traces of memory and place. His paintings are at once ancient and immediate—not merely depictions of nature but metaphors for the mind—placing him within the Romantic tradition in which the natural world mirrors human emotion. In this way, reference and material recede, leaving the paintings’ emotional resonance as their enduring subject.

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