Lewis Brander: East and West | Vardaxoglou Gallery
Lewis Brander painted these large-scale works in his studio in Whitechapel, east London. They’re being shown to the west in a small gallery in a dark mews in Soho. The works are bright and ethereal, the oil paint thinly applied in featherlight strokes to his linen canvases. He worked on many of them over the course of years, returning to them for touchups as the seasons passed.
The paintings tend to show views of clouds, probably at sunrise and twilight. A couple of others are almost figurative, showing trees on a canal. They’re Romantic skies, but the compositions also nod to more recent masters of abstract colour fields, Mark Rothko and Howard Hodgkin. (The latter showed at the same gallery recently, I learned).
L-R: ‘Vincent Terrace’ (2021-25), London Light (2023-25), Copse (2024-25)
I’ve often written about artists who capture weak, watery London light. Brander’s is neither. In fact, he’s inspired less by the sky above his east London studio than the gaudily coloured fabrics of south Asian textiles, the kind that are seen in his local markets. Whitechapel’s home to London’s Bengali community. That’s the east and west the show’s title refers to.
I stepped out into the mews: the sky was clear but dim, even though it was towards the middle of the day. The market was closing. Fabric was packed away.
Lewis Brander: East and West is at Vardaxoglou Gallery (London). 11 October - 13 December 2025