‘Growth’ | In Conversation with Gary Stranger | Woodbury House

Filmed on the South Downs, Gary Stranger talks through ‘Growth’, the most personal body of work of his career. The exhibition opens at Woodbury House, Mayfair, on 21st August 2026.

It begins with a wall in Brighton, where Stranger paints ‘Growth’ by hand, letter by letter, in the brush style that runs through the show. From there the conversation moves to Firle Beacon, on the South Downs Way, the landscape he calls his studio. “My best thinking is done out in the environment. The ideas, the concepts, the theory behind the work all take place out here.”

Stranger speaks about grinding the chalk of the Downs into a paint of his own making, so the hills themselves are in the work. About solar pyrography, focusing sunlight through a lens to burn marks directly into wood, something from nothing, with no margin for error. And about the deliberate loosening of a practice built on three decades of precision. “My paintings used to be very precise, very linear, very tight. Very uptight, actually. I am going through a process of forcing myself out of that.” ‘Growth’ brings together more than thirty new works.

It opens at Woodbury House, 29 Sackville Street, Mayfair, on 21st August 2026 and runs through 30th September.