‘GROWTH’

His most personal body of work to date

‘Growth’ is a new body of work drawn from the landscape of the South Downs: large-scale paintings and works on paper, a number of them painted with a pigment the artist makes himself from the chalk of the Downs. It is his second solo exhibition with Woodbury House, following ‘Self Help’ in 2025, and it opens in Mayfair on 21st August.

Those who register receive the fully illustrated catalogue ahead of the opening, previews of available works before anyone else, and first news throughout the run. Registering costs nothing and holds your place at the front.

The concept is the first work

‘Growth’ is a new body of work by Gary Stranger in which the concept is the first work, and the painting its most visible expression. What the collector acquires is the object, but 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.

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.

Colour drawn from the place it describes

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, 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 he 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.

From graffiti walls to the Royal Academy

Gary Stranger’s practice began where most typography does not: on walls, at night, in the mid-1990s. Graffiti taught him the letter, and the letter never let him go. Through MSK, one of the most respected and influential graffiti crews in the world, he earned his place in a culture built on style, risk and discipline. Three decades on, the subject has never changed, only the refinement: the spray can gave way to the brush, the tag to a single considered word, executed freehand with a precision most would assume was machined.

His work is held in the collection of STRAAT, Amsterdam’s museum for street art and graffiti, and he has exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts. In the South Downs, the landscape this exhibition is drawn from, the Ditchling Museum of Art + Craft commissioned him to letter the village in Johnston Sans, marking the centenary of the London Underground typeface. His debut solo exhibition with Woodbury House, ‘Self Help’, opened in August 2025 to a strong collector response. ‘Growth’ is the next chapter.

In the artist’s words