“William Brickel’s elongated, sometimes contorted, often intense figures possess an ambiguous beauty that is a bluntly modern nod to 16th-century mannerist styling, offering a whiff of Paul Cadmus, Lucian Freud, or even Egon Schiele. Mostly, though, they hold your eye with their strong and distinctive presence; they crackle with feeling, pulling you in with their mysterious sets and clothes”

Simon Chilvers, Vogue, 2024

Larsen / Warner is thrilled to present The Finding of a Nature, a solo exhibition of new paintings by British artist William Brickel (b. 1994, UK) This is the artists first exhibition with the gallery and his first in Scandinavia. Brickel’s works are the result of imagination, recalled memories, and observations of everyday situations. The human figure is a recurrent and central concern in Brickel’s practice, providing a means to examine the contemporary status of the self, the other, and how the two may exist together.

There has been a renewed interest in experimental modes of figuration among contemporary painters in recent years. Since graduating from his MA at the Royal Drawing School in London in 2018, Brickel has created an expressive mode of figurative painting that builds on the canonical Western painting tradition, fusing influences such as The Pre Raphaelites, William Blake, Stanley Spencer, Lucian Freud and Otto Dix. Brickel’s figures, painted in muted colours with their impossible contortions compressed into domestic spaces, evoke restrained, artificial atmospheres that carry echoes of 16th century Italian mannerist artists such as Pontormo and Giorgio Vasari.

Brickel’s compositions conjure the emotionally illegible dramas that emerge from awkward, painful human entanglements. The paintings depict contorted male figures that can seem at once flirtatious, sensuous, violent and contemplative, projecting the full range of human emotion. The figures eyes are almost always looking away from both the viewer and the other men in the scene, they seem to long for something outside the frame. If not alone, and often they appear in pairs or groups, the figures playfully and wistfully wrap around and caress one another with oversized hands.

Brickel’s technique is rooted in drawing, with transparent washes layered on top of each other to build soft transitions of light and shadow. Muted earth tones, dusty pinks, pale blues, olive greens, and warm browns are occasionally interrupted by sharper accents of red or black that intensify the emotional tensions within each work. Brickel’s paintings present tonal harmony and delicate gradations that allow the paintings to feel both intimate and cinematic.

Brickel’s preoccupation with reinterpreting his own past (the artist has stated that sometimes he is painting himself remembering a version of himself) are at the heart of why his painting can read so ambiguously. The artist states.  “My characters are just that, they are characters, ever-changing yet somewhat the same. They morph from person to person, never resting on someone in particular. But also simultaneously they are someone particular, or me, or not me but someone else, a shifting soup of personality.”

William Brickel lives and works in Gloucestershire, UK. In 2018, Brickel graduated with an MA from London’s Royal Drawing School, and received a BA in Photography from Camberwell College of Art, London. Brickel was an artist resident at Palazzo Monti Artist Residency, Brescia, Italy, (2018); and Borgo Pingnano, Pisa, Italy (2018). In 2021, Brickel held his first solo museum exhibition, I’d Tell You If I Could, at the San Luis Obispo Museum of Art, CA. Brickel’s work is included in the permanent collections of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, CA; and The Prince of Wales, Royal Collection Trust, London, UK, among others.