Wholesale Vanessa Brassey | 'Mini Epic Poolside'

OIL ON WOOD BLOC Painting Vanessa Brassey is a British figurative painter best known for her swimmer paintings, which explore movement, freedom, and the sensation of being suspended in time. Working in mixed media, she combines oil paint with hand-worked inks and layered collage to create richly textured surfaces in which colour is used expressively rather than descriptively. Her paintings often feel remembered rather than observed, capturing moments that carry emotional charge as well as physical presence. Alongside her studio practice, Brassey has spent over a decade working across the GLAM sector. She is Co-Director of the Centre for Philosophy and Arts, based at King’s College London, where she completed her PhD and later lectured. For the past six years she has collaborated with the National Gallery on public philosophy events, developing formats that bring sustained looking, conversation, and reflection into dialogue with artworks and audiences. This long engagement with how images are encountered and experienced continues to inform her painting practice. Brassey’s work has been exhibited widely in the UK, including at Mall Galleries and the Affordable Art Fairs in Battersea and Hampstead, and has been selected for major contemporary painting awards such as the ING Discerning Eye Exhibition, the British Contemporary Artist Award (Finalist, 2024), and the Women in Art Award. Her work is held in private collections and is also represented through artist-designed editions stocked by Daunt Books and other independent retailers. Messengers series The Messengers series is narratively grounded, drawing on the idea of memory as a messenger — something that brings versions of the past into the present, where events are reconsidered leading to revision, editing, and resolution or tagged for amplification and further distortion. Swimmers emerge from amniotic seascapes, emotionally charged spaces in which pivotal scenes are returned to and replayed from shifting viewpoints, shaped as much by retelling as by event. The paintings are built slowly, in layers, with earlier marks partially worked over rather than erased. These traces remain present beneath the surface, faintly reappearing through the figures and giving the sense that each image holds more than one moment at once. The series is less concerned with memory as a fixed image than with how it is carried in the body — how experience resurfaces, alters, and continues to move forward through time. “My painting practice is shaped by a long-standing engagement with philosophy, particularly questions about how images, seen, imagined, recalled, and conflations of all these three, hold and show us time, allowing different versions of experience to coexist. Swimming recurs as a subject because it alters the body’s relation to time and gravity. In water, movement is slowed and resistance becomes palpable; attention turns inward, and memory surfaces in a less linear way".