Vardaxoglou is pleased to present Aegean, a group exhibition featuring works by Lewis Brander, Barbara Hepworth, Kentaro Okumura, Ben Nicholson, Sebastian Lloyd Rees, Anastasia Pavlou and Peter Davies, artists united by a shared connection to Greece as both place and idea. Across generations and practices, Greece emerges not just as a geographical reference, but as a source of varying approaches to form, material, light, and abstraction.
The exhibition establishes a conversation between various twentieth century works and contemporary artists working today. Works by Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth reflect encounters with Greece that informed their respective approaches to abstraction. Ben Nicholson’s drawing Chapel in Greece was made in Patmos during his travels around the Greek islands in 1967. It is one of few works from this trip which register architectural structure and contemplative interior space through restrained line and prepared grounds. Barbara Hepworth’s bronze Aegean (1956), produced shortly after her visit to Greece, demonstrates her exploration of cast metal as a fluid, tense medium. Its pierced and curvilinear forms reference the sea while extending the formal language of modernist sculpture.
The contemporary works in the exhibition situate Greece not just as motif but also as condition. Having lived in Athens from 2018 to 2020, Lewis Brander’s paintings continually respond to Mediterranean light and the material presence of archaeological surfaces, filtered through duration and memory. Kentaro Okumura’s Chair (2026), made during a recent period spent in Athens, operates between figuration and abstraction, translating lived environments into condensed symbolic forms. Since relocating to Athens in 2020, Sebastian Lloyd Rees has produced paintings informed by the city’s spatial rhythms, surfaces, and atmospheric shifts, extending an earlier engagement with urban materiality.
Anastasia Pavlou’s practice is informed by an ongoing investigation into how images occur, shift, and interact, treating painting as a dynamic event rather than a fixed object. In Peter Davies’ Northern Sky (2025), produced in Athens last year, the artist sought to create a painting that brings together the emotion of expressionism, the atmosphere of impressionism, the discipline of formalism, and the structural awareness of conceptualism.
Aegean considers how place functions not solely as subject but as a structuring force within artistic production. The exhibition proposes Greece as an enduring field of enquiry in which antiquity, modernism, and contemporary practice remain in active relation.
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