Stuart Brisley
11th September - 25 October 2025
Private view 10th September, 6-8pm.
Photography by Agnese Sanvito
Dead Life (2021 – 2024)
Acrylic, crayon, graphite, acrylic varnish on canvas
110 x 165 cm
Untitled (1960)
Masonite board, canvas, PVA, sand, pigment, oil paint and tar
101 x 151 cm
Untitled (1962)
Wood, stain
93 x 60 x 21 cm
Munich Assemblages and the later assemblages made in America
Assemblage has a multitude of meanings in the English language.
In relation to these works for example, it could mean collection, gathering, convergence, sociability. The words alone seem to be already heralding what was soon to become the 60's and all that is implied in the naming of that decade: the streets, spatial relativity, Situationists, whiff of revolutions. It is curious that whenever I start typing the word revolution, the computer wants to correct it as 'redo' or 'revel'.
At this stage I was already looking for found objects and materials in the streets, on building sites, in abandoned in between spaces, in damaged grounds. There were still major building works stemming from war destruction in London and Munich as elsewhere. This is in retrospect an early development arising from searching to make works which expressed a condition of the everyday and was subject to simple manifestations of making processes, perhaps more related to unskilled labour then artisanal expertise.
Communication and action was primary, power was not.
I had refused the application of more traditional skills taught in the art schools in the 50's and with those, ideas of endowment, efficiency, quantifiable quality and so on. This approach to art practice was also informed by a political education which later led to enjoining direct action in the socio-political sense with art practice itself leading to art actions which were preferred by the progressives, such as The New Left movements of the time across the continents.
Keywords for these works would be free and simpleness.
Stuart Brisley
London, 2015.
The Georgiana Collection (1979–86)
Unique chromogenic print, mounted in aluminium frame
77 x 102 cm
The Georgiana Collection (1979–86)
Unique chromogenic print, mounted in aluminium frame
77 x 102 cm
Georgiana Collection text on photography
The Georgiana collection was conceived as a fictitious institution comprising works of art specifically concerned with Georgiana St, London N.W.1. It is nothing special, just another London street. I lived there between 1978 and 1986. In 1979 I decided that wherever I lived was to become the subject of a project.
People live mostly in one section of the street. In the other separated by a large one way street, there are just two living units, a British Electricity storage and administration centre. and some waste ground. To the east and south was a large area of waste ground stretching away to two railway terminals, Kings Cross and St Pancras. There were times when the demarcation between what is conceived to be private and domestic spilled out, breaking the boundaries between the notion of 'private' and 'public' space. The Street was used as a lavatory, a bedroom, a rubbish tip, a playground, a boudoir, a battleground. an asylum. All this and more washed up and down, in and out or the less inhabited part of the street. In this occasionally glimpsed chaos. peripherally perceived, I picked up a camera and pointed it at things which had somehow or other arrived there. Some or those things were people.
Looking through the camera was in effect like looking through the spy hole in the front door. If the door opened so abruptly into the street, the spy hole offered access while maintaining privacy. The distance it provided offered the opportunity to create another fiction which on the face of it appeared to be closely connected to 'reality’. And it offered a unique opportunity to contribute to the fictitious 'collection'.
How far is it possible to be removed from immanent social engagement while dealing with what is all around the house, the street? The street is chaos reigned in, only dimly perceived as when blood stains lead nowhere. Perhaps that it is all I could see.
There were no significant moments when images were shot. as one moment in time and space might yield another photographic moment of equal value, but only if the internal demands of the mind whose finger is resting on the shutter release button so demanded. These images refer to the idea that there is nothing which will not yield meaning somehow or in one way or another when the subject is clearly in the mind. Conversely each photograph exists in its own terms, as does the Georgiana Collection.
Stuart Brisley
London, July 1991.
From the catalogue of Lieux Communs, Figures Singulieres, Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 1992, curated by Jean-Francois Chevrier. Page 60.
After Xray of Ensor’s The Intrigue, 1890 (2024-25)
Graphite, crayon and acrylic on paper
56 x 76 cm
I have spent a year’s speculative involvement concerning what I term as certainties.
The Xray of The Intrigue itself which was scanned well after the artist’s death in 1940 as a subject follows that this selected Xray is what has been considered.
The attraction to the idea of a photographic image of an internal body revealing the artwork proved to be a difficult prospect; one which took some time and close attention.It is only latterly in the last month or so that working through the Xray became an intermittent pleasure.
It comes as an archeological interpretation.
Stuart Brisley
Dungeness, July 2025
Small Skull (2015)
Graphite and watercolour on paper
37.5 x 37.3 cm
Olive Branch (2022)
Acrylic on canvas board
50 x 40 cm
Kinglet (2015)
Watercolour on paper
29 x 35 cm
Bits and Pieces (2008)
Graphite on paper
66 x 102 cm