Stephen Appleby-Barr. Mesocosmos

23 May-4 Jul 2025

Stephen Appleby-Barr

Overview

Robilant+Voena is pleased to announce an exhibition of paintings by Stephen Appleby-Barr in London. This is the Canadian-born artist’s first exhibition with Robilant+Voena since 2022, presenting a new body of work that he has created over the last two years. Together, the paintings offer a glimpse into a realm of wondrous yet familiar visions, combining Appleby-Barr’s immense technical mastery with dreamlike imaginings disconnected from time or place. The exhibition presents the artist’s Mesocosmos, a self-contained universe that sits in the interstitial space between the macro and the micro, between before and after, between fiction and non-fiction, a shifting sphere shaped by an innately personal relationship with the world.

The twenty-one paintings in the exhibition have an almost spectral quality, resolute visual evocations giving way to hazy recollections. There is a presiding sense of harmony and spirit throughout Appleby-Barr’s creations, depicting subjects that are at once fantastical and familiar. Featuring architectural structures, ethereal figures and commonplace objects, the paintings are also threaded with art history – forms rendered with sharp chiaroscuro reminiscent of Baroque Old Masters, and assemblages of objects that appear like uncanny still lifes.

Artists