Bryan Spier: Isolation Paintings

Bryan Spier: Isolation Paintings is Spier’s seventh exhibition with the gallery, and continues his enduring exploration of colour and abstraction. Featuring works in a range of sizes, these new paintings are a meditation on the split screen and jump-cut reality that dominated during the months of lockdown that we all endured. More than ever as we tried to wrench some meaningful interpersonal contact and experience from a screen-based display; there was always a glitch, a lag, or intrusive crop to thwart that hope. 

Spier’s home studio became a haven from this reality as the Wi-Fi signal was so weak there. Yet he couldn’t help reflecting on the experience and translating it into his visual language of shapes and colour. Perhaps these paintings simply memorialise the experience we all lived through, yet maybe they can also propose a way to reconcile our 3-dimensional lives with the necessity of 2-dimensional interactions. It’s also possible that the artist was just delirious from isolation.