Woodbury House is proud to announce ‘Growth’, a new solo exhibition by Gary Stranger, on view from 21st August through 30th September 2026 at the gallery’s Mayfair space.

‘Growth’ is Stranger’s second solo exhibition with the gallery, following ‘Self Help’ in 2025, and represents the most personal body of work of his career, with in excess of thirty new works on show.

For Stranger, the concept is the first work, and the painting only its most visible expression. What the collector acquires is the object. What the object holds is everything that preceded it: the landscape walked, the material gathered, the labour performed, and the state of mind from which the work emerged.

To be among the first to receive the exhibition catalogue and previews of available works, please register your interest by clicking here.

Here, the title behaves less like a theme than a method. Nothing in this exhibition announced itself quickly. The works are the visible end of processes that move at their own pace: a practice refined across three decades, a palette accumulated through seasons, a material coaxed into permanence. What reaches the wall is the conclusion of something long, patient and largely unseen.

The word earns its meaning twice over. It describes how these works were made: slowly, by hand, at the pace the process demanded. And it describes the period that produced them, a chapter of the artist’s life in which everything, including the work, was given room to grow.

The natural world is both source and studio. Stranger does not wait for inspiration in the studio. It arrives when he is outside, moving through the landscape, alert to what the land offers. That experience accumulates subconsciously and draws him back to make. The resulting works carry the energy of those encounters even when they are resolved quietly on canvas.

The colour in ‘Growth’ takes its inspiration from where the artist lives and walks. Seaweed greens, downland wildflowers, the restless colour of the Channel: these move through the works not as landscape painting but as a palette absorbed over time and carried back to the canvas. Sometimes the reference is exact. The red-brown of ‘Gnosis’ is Dulse, a seaweed of the Sussex shore. The deep grounds of ‘Recover’ and ‘Solace’ are kelp, olive to near-black as it dries on the rocks. The blue of ‘Geist’ is the milky aqua the sea turns when chalk washes from the cliffs into calm water. It changes as the year changes, and the works hold those shifts.

Running through the exhibition is a consciousness of materials and their origins, held as a working practice rather than an ideology. Wherever the making allows, Stranger produces his own pigments from what occurs naturally around him.

For a number of the works in ‘Growth’, the medium is chalk: the bedrock of the Downs, a substance that exists to erode. ‘Recover’ is painted almost entirely in it, chalk ground and bound into paint. That Stranger has made from it a paint built to archival standards is the show’s quiet paradox: permanence, from a material that resists it.

Two small works on wood go further still, drawn with the sun itself: solar pyrography, their marks burned into the grain through a lens, made from focused light and nothing else. One was made on the summer solstice and carries the old name of that day, the sun’s own festival, as its title. The other turns the method into a lesson, burning in a single word as a reminder of the value of humility.

Gary Stranger is one of the most significant voices in contemporary typographic art. His journey began in the mid-1990s through graffiti, executed under cover of darkness on city walls and trains, and it earned him a place in MSK (Mad Society Kings), one of the most respected and influential graffiti crews in the world, long recognised as a vanguard of creative excellence.

Over three decades he has evolved that foundation into something singular: a visual language rooted in typography but liberated from its utilitarian purpose. His paintings are not just about words, but about what words feel like. Each begins with a single considered word or phrase, committed to canvas as a form of release. Everything is drawn by hand. No stencils, no shortcuts.

For more on his journey, read Introducing Gary Stranger or watch our filmed conversation with the artist. You can also follow him on Instagram.

Collectors who know Stranger’s work know its precision: lines so exact they are routinely mistaken for machine work. ‘Growth’ is looser, and deliberately so. The evolution is visible: an artist whose reputation was built on precision, allowing the hand to loosen, and whose paintings faithfully record the life behind them.

“This work was created during a period of personal growth and self-reflection, a deliberate move away from noise and towards stillness. The coarser brushstrokes and bolder shapes reflect an acceptance of things beyond my control: becoming comfortable with imperfection, letting go of the need to make everything precise, and learning to live with what life delivers. If the work feels looser than before, that’s because I am.” Gary Stranger

On view are in excess of thirty works spanning every register of Stranger’s output: large-scale canvases approaching four metres, paintings on wood panel, and an extensive series of works on paper, from the monumental to pieces that sit in the palm of a hand.

Each carries a single considered word, rendered freehand with the discipline of a lifetime spent in service of the letter. Together they read as the vocabulary of a life under examination: some turned inward toward stillness and repair, others facing the noise of the world the artist has stepped back from.

‘Growth’ by Gary Stranger opens on 21st August 2026 and runs through 30th September 2026 at Woodbury House, 29 Sackville Street, Mayfair, London W1S 3DX. Gallery hours: Monday to Thursday 10:00 to 18:00, Friday 10:00 to 17:00.

To be among the first to receive the fully illustrated exhibition catalogue and previews of available works ahead of the opening, please register your interest by clicking here.