The Mind’s Weather

Lisson Gallery is delighted to present an exhibition of new works by Christopher Le Brun. Across an extensive sequence of canvases, the artist enacts a decisive shift towards representation following the abstract emphasis of his work of the past two decades. That abstract register – always a means of mediating between images and sensations – resolves into clear, cosmic visions of nature.

Le Brun’s long-time interest in the spatial and emotional possibilities of colour finds new focus in these scenes. Solar orbs glow amid fields of atomised colour, for example in the panoramic canvases Quarry (2026) and Press (Sun Notes IV) (2026). The sun, at once a source of light and a pictorial crux, is a recurring motif – transmuting at times into moons, planets, or other stars. Numerous works feature multiple suns, suggesting either a parallel cosmos or the passing of time.

In this way, the radical open-endedness of Le Brun’s abstract compositions persists. The figurative imagery of his work of the 1970s and ’80s, which often conveyed mythic or narrative subtexts, re-emerges in scenes that appear celestial and palpably physical by turns. The Chalk Pit (2026) re-envisions the South Downs as an outspreading landscape on an expansive scale, the stability of the rambling terrain offset by a sense of fracture or dispersal. A thicket of white at the centre of the picture suggests both an excavation and an outbreak of light.