Dexter Dalwood: English Painting

Dexter Dalwood’s inaugural exhibition with Lisson Gallery represents a return to the artist’s homeland and to the subject of what it might mean to be an ‘English’ painter. After an initial period at a residency in Mexico in 2017, Dalwood moved there to live and work full-time since 2022. Now, from this relative distance, he has begun to re-consider his attachments to English art history and the culture of his youth, growing up in 1970s and ’80s Britain. The question of whether national identity can be determined or distilled through art is explored in this new group of paintings that consider the legacies of traditional genres, such as landscape or the lowlier practice of horse portraiture, all the way up to twentieth-century movements, including the Bloomsbury Group and Pop Art.