Browse & Darby is delighted to present Headland, an exhibition of recent work by Kieran Stiles.
This exhibition presents a compelling body of work shaped by Stiles’ immersive, site-responsive practice. Each painting is made outside, in direct dialogue with a series of specific places, creating a kind of meeting point between what’s out there and how we see it.
His compositions emerge through gestural marks charged with bursts of electric colour, often applied using found tools such as grasses and sticks - materials that sometimes become embedded into the painting surface itself. This method invites chance and unpredictability, resulting in works that feel immediate, dynamic, and deeply connected to their environment.
Some paintings are meditative, others explosive. What they all have in common, is a sense of how the raw charge of nature can heighten perception and stir the imagination. It is this rare ability to astonish that makes his work so special. Just as nature can excite and surprises us, his paintings have the ability to grasp the viewer in an embrace that allows us to be present in the landscape with him, where seeing is active, shifting and fully engaged.
Kieran has been represented by Browse & Darby since 2017. He has exhibited at The Saatchi Gallery and The Mall Galleries (ING Discerning Eye award 2024). In 2019 he was awarded the position of Visiting Fellow in the Creative Arts at Merton College, Oxford University, where his work is held in the College’s permanent collection and was featured in the Saturday Times by Rachel Campbell-Johnston. Kieran lectures at The Ashmolean Museum, Oxford University, in connection with their major exhibitions, and at The TS Eliot Theatre, Merton College Oxford. He holds a Fine Art BA (hons) degree, Falmouth University, and post graduate degree in art education, Brighton University.
