Lewis Brander

About

Lewis Brander was born in London in 1995. He studied Fine Art at Goldsmiths College graduating in 2018, before moving to Athens, Greece. In 2021 he returned to London where he now lives and works from a studio in East London. The artist’s first solo exhibition in London and first exhibition with Vardaxoglou Gallery took place in July 2022.

An observer of the shifts in natural light in both Northern and Southern Europe, the colour of the sky has become a constant reference in Lewis Brander’s paintings since returning to London from Greece four years ago. Upon moving to Athens in 2018, the artist became exposed to a new landscape and quality of light. Now working from the top-floor of a disused factory in East London, his studio’s views of the sky have allowed him to sustain this study of light over extended periods. Brander references sites of historical significance both to industrial London and also to his own familial history; his ancestors were refugees from Eastern Europe and settled near the area where he now works. Brander combines these histories with an interpretation of the historical movements of English romanticism, post-war American abstraction and the School of London painters. Lewis Brander’s paintings are a device for which light and atmosphere are not only observed and recorded, but a place in which the language and history of painting is played out.

In ArtReview, Tom Morton writes “For an artist born in 1995, there's much that is curiously retrograde in [Lewis] 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. At his best, Brander employs landscape as a method of drawing disparate moments - even histories - together into a single image. What he paints is not only space, but also time.”