‘Lewis Brander: Recent Paintings’ reviewed by Tom Morton for ArtReview

Review by Tom Morton
ArtReview
March 2024

“While the titles Lewis Brander gives to his paintings indicate that they depict the sky looming over the cities of London and Athens, when seen from a distance these works might easily be mistaken for monochromes. Take London (2019-23), a small and heady rectangle of absinthe-green, which only reveals its motif when we get close enough to the canvas to note a muted horizon line and the way the British artist employs the subtlest of tonal modulations to suggest the play of sunlight on diffuse, barely-there clouds. If these are paintings that demand slow, careful looking, then they also take a long time to produce: according to their dates, this might be up to five years…

“For an artist born in 1995, there's much that is curiously retrograde in Brander's painterly address. There are elements of J.M.W. Turner's light-strafed romanticism and of James McNeill Whistler's misty urban sublime, traces of Brice Marden's fields of fine-tuned colour and of Howard Hodgkin's heat-hazed, near-abstract landscapes…”

Read the full review in ArtReview’s March 2024 issue, out now, or by clicking the button below.