This essay emerged from both Gavin Gleeson’s first solo exhibition, Partial Parade, at Saskia Neuman Gallery, Stockholm (2 October–1 November 2025), and a broader consideration of his practice, which I have followed from his time at the Royal College of Art to the present.

My first impression of Gleeson’s work, as I ventured into his studio at the Royal College of Art back in 2023, was a sense of serious focus and an endless feeling of playful possibility. There is something to be said about these seemingly contradictory modes of making; though there are many painstaking and arduous methods involved in his process, Gleeson occupies a rare position, one that manages to float above both the dangers of heady intent and the weight of infinite direction. This methodology sits at the core of the work. There are visible workings-out and reassembling of familiar forms, alongside a clear desire to ground the material of paint in an urgency that reflects our time. For other artists, this methodology might be an anxious wrestle to “find” the painting, but Gleeson successfully dances with, and through, the struggle toward a lucid articulation of an illogical and destabilising contemporary political and social landscape.

Gleeson’s first solo exhibition, Partial Parade, at Saskia Neuman Gallery, which I visited at the end of last year, presents work developed over a two-year period. What is immediately apparent upon first viewing the exhibition is the lack of a consistent commitment to a single, stabilising forethought throughout the body of work. Gleeson moves through each painting with a sensitivity that allows it to reach its own resolution. This may at first feel like inconsistency. At times, he works over a surface until it becomes a more precise and complex tapestry of marks, accumulating into a densely organised pictorial structure. In other works, only a few concise marks are applied, leaving a remarkably poetic trace on the surface. What comes across is a sensitivity to surface and to the objecthood of the painting, evoking Rose Wylie’s tactile approach to figuration. At the edges of the canvas, visible creases, fingermarks and spills reveal a surface being actively negotiated and handled.

This approach is almost a “have your cake and eat it too” situation for Gleeson. Where artists can often rest in a thematic quagmire of a coherent body of work, planned and orchestrated with pictorial consistency, Gleeson rejects this formula, allowing space for a more expansive medley of work that holds together through shared sensibility rather than fixed consistency. His approach to each work on its own terms is a difficult way of working, requiring constant conscious but not self-conscious conviction and a forcefulness without rigidity.

Paradoxically, what emerges through this process of shifting is a surprising clarity in an artistic vision of playful defiance. On a pictorial level, Gleeson takes overt motifs such as ladders, balloons, disembodied limbs, and buildings to the outer regions of logic, and there is an obvious schoolboy mischief in the handling of these more concrete moments. But rather than being bogged down by the need for these symbols to act out an intent, they instead become vessels through which the artwork opens up to the viewer. Fluidity is key here, as moments of factual reality are met with possibilities that are at times ambiguous in outlook. Sometimes there is a claustrophobic oppression in the towering forms; in others, there is a breathing passage through to more expansive spaces. Whatever the mood of each work, the overarching principle is a conscious movement through and over the systematic logic of daily life. These personal motifs are not inherently self-involved but locally grounded, allowing space for the viewer to both ground themselves within momentary solidity and still flow through the work.

At the core of it, Gleeson taps into the irrationality of our time, the absurdity of modern life, and the lingering consequences of systemic and enacted violence. These ideas manifest through the destabilisation of pictorial logic rather than overt critique. The paintings never hammer at the viewer with didacticism; their subtlety never collapses into obscurity, nor do they retreat into cynical detachment. While Gleeson does not reference explicit political discourse, he constructs a painterly world in which meaning is continually disassembled and reconfigured. The impact lies not in the recognition of a single event but in the cumulative sense of injustice, from the most abhorrent to the most trivial. Yet his tendency to playfully float over horror does not imbue the work with cold indifference; rather, it sustains an urgency that invokes fluidity and humour through both horror and solidity.

In all accounts, there is a persistent exploration of possibilities across both literal and psychological landscapes, and a surprising amount of humanity in what, on first impression, might seem a mischievous spin on the doodles of a frustrated student rejecting the imposition of authority for its own sake. It is remarkable how such a simple conviction can generate such a clever and ambitious artistic practice.

As first solo exhibitions go, it feels as though playful conviction has paid off, and this chapter of Gleeson’s practice has moved decisively out of the studio as a clear statement into a world it both engages with and resists, without a hint of lofty conviction or calculated subversion. There is a great deal of promise and space to expand within his approach to painting and the methodology that underpins it, and this debut solo presentation of Partial Parade demonstrates the strength of that trajectory.

Pigeonhole Essay Series