Art Brussels
Friday 24 - Saturday 25: 11am - 7pm
Sunday 26: 11am - 6pm
Vigo Gallery at Art Brussels 2026 | Johnny Abrahams
Vigo Gallery presents new work by Johnny Abrahams at Art Brussels 2026, including the debut of his hessian diptych series.
For Abrahams, painting is fundamentally a means of organising reality, not by depicting the external world, but by establishing his own internal systems through which perception and experience are structured. His practice unfolds as a dialogue between scale, materiality, and what he calls the subtle drama of contact: form, colour, and spacing are not illustrative elements but operative ones, determining how a viewer encounters and moves through a work.
The large blue and black oil paintings, for which Abrahams is best known, are built around the careful arrangement of geometric forms held in a state of near-contact, hovering, aligning, and resisting one another. Their restrained palette and emphasis on materiality heighten an acute sensitivity to edge and interval, generating a quiet yet insistent tension. The surfaces are dense and materially rich, absorbing light into their grooves while catching and reflecting it off raised peaks, creating a subtle raking effect that shifts and glistens as you move. These are contemplative paintings, slow and commanding, inviting a focused encounter with form and void.
The small hessian diptychs work differently. Pairs of stacked panels, black against amber, navy against ochre, where all the energy concentrates at the seam where one colour meets another, a boundary that seems to hum with the friction between them. The rough weave of the hessian gives each field a warmth and physicality that canvas resists, and the layered surfaces carry visible traces of process and touch. More improvisational in feeling, they record something closer to a moment of experimentation or chance, a visual melody where the larger works offer meditation.
What unites both bodies of work is Abrahams' sustained sensitivity to the moment of encounter, whether between two monumental forms or two adjacent colours, and a careful balance between control and unpredictability, precision and play.
