Unit London launches its new gallery with The Garden, an inaugural show by Ryan Hewett

The Garden by the South African artist features an entirely new series of brightly-saturated oil paintings, incorporated with a myriad of geometric structures, depicting abstract figurative forms and isolated environments, drawing from human experience and the natural world.

The eponymous hero piece, The Garden, lends its name to the title of the exhibition and can be viewed as a starting point for the artist’s evolving exploration of multi-dimensional landscapes and complex layering. The new body of work retains the heavily vigorous textural quality of Hewett’s distinctive earlier practice, alongside a juxtaposition of flattened angular shapes that draws the viewers’ focus back to the materiality and technique of traditional painting.

Renowned for his brooding and evocative paintings, Hewett sees the portrait as not about capturing an external likeness of a subject; but rather creating a portal to the inner journey of self-exploration. His techniques have evolved from tightly wrought pencil drawings into the looser, layered richly hued surfaces of his present work.

You can discover more during Ryan Hewett: The Garden, which will run until 22 July 2018 at Unit London. Find out more at theunitldn.com.