LONDON.- Jonathan Clark presents an exhibition of paintings by Christopher Bramham, including new and unseen works from 2008 to 2016.

Throughout the exhibition, Bramham focuses on exploring the true essence of the subject close at hand – perhaps a white bowl or white stones in his studio – or nature spied from his studio window. Yet the content seems less important than the powerful sculptural quality of the work, for every brushstroke is thick with astonishing impasto. He looks at a tree so long and so hard that, over time, he learns by heart the curve of every branch and their meandering rhythms. Without being a photorealist, Braham’s paintings are both real and fictional because they translate the essence of a subject into another medium – paint. Few artists can have ever brought the thick crust of the bark of a tree so effectively to life, as if the painting were more real than reality itself.

The paintings are built up very slowly and Bramham frequently returns to the same, easily accessible scenes. “I paint because I find it [nature] endlessly beautiful,” he says. He is one of the younger generations to be influenced by artists such as Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach, and was included, together with Peter Doig and Tony Bevan in the ‘The School of London and their Friends’ at the Yale Center for British Art in 2000.

In 1982 Bramham met Freud for the first time after a friend offered to take something of his to show the older artist. Over time they developed a close friendship and Bramham sat for Freud in 1989 and again, with his two children, in 1990. “I learnt from Lucian how to persist with a picture… To do that you have to love the subject…”

There will be an illustrated catalogue by Sebastian Smee, which will be available in the second week of February.