Vardaxoglou is pleased to present ‘Stonehouse’, a solo exhibition with Athens-based Sebastian Lloyd Rees (b. 1986, Stavanger, Norway). It is the artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. An extended essay by Sam Lincoln accompanies the exhibition, readable below.
The exhibition presents new works by the artist, inspired by the Zen Buddhist poetry of the Chinese poet Shiwu (also known as Stonehouse, 1272–1352). Rees discovered Stonehouse during his intensive engagement with Zen Buddhism and its influence on prominent abstract artists such as Agnes Martin and Ad Reinhardt.
Through layered and refined graphite drawings, Rees explores themes such as impermanence and the dichotomy between movement and stillness. His works resist clear readability and evoke the tradition of artists like Cy Twombly or Brice Marden, yet establish their own voice through raw, unexpected lines. Rees invites viewers to dwell in uncertainty and to experience the beauty of open interpretation—a visual meditation on ambiguity.
An extended essay by Sam Lincoln, an art writer and researcher from Boston, Massachusetts, accompanies the exhibition, offering an in-depth analysis of the works on display.
Sebastian Lloyd Rees (b. 1986, Stavanger, Norway) is an artist based between Athens and London. With the artist Ali Eisa, he is part of an ongoing collaboration known as Lloyd Corporation. Since completing his BA at Goldsmiths in 2010, Lloyd Rees’s painting has evolved through several distinct stages; all of which interrogate the ways in which painting can articulate the subjective interactions between the artist and the ever-changing built and natural environments that he has called home.
In his first major series, the Hoarding Works (2014–2018), Lloyd Rees worked with repurposed wooden boards that had been recovered from the hoarding around construction sites in London and New York. In 2020, after moving to Athens, Lloyd Rees developed a more lyrical visual language to reflect his emerging relationship with the Mediterranean, culminating in the Black Paintings (2021–2023) – the subject of a solo exhibition at Vardaxoglou in the Autumn of 2023. Lloyd Rees continues to chart this relationship with the Stonehouse series (2024–), which includes both paintings and works on paper and takes significant inspiration from the poetry of Shiwu, or Stonehouse, a 13th-century hermit who lived in the mountains of Yushan, China.
Sam Lincoln is an art writer and researcher from Boston, Massachusetts. He is a contributing editor to the Oxonian Review, and has written extensively on the reception of classical aesthetics in modern and contemporary art. His dissertation for Oxford’s MSt in art history, “The White, White, White Sea: A Postclassical Account of Cy Twombly’s Mediterranean Myth,” won the Association for Art History’s 2023 Postgraduate Dissertation Prize. He received his BA in classics and comparative literature from Harvard, where he won a Bowdoin Prize for an essay on Cy Twombly’s poetic inscriptions.
Better to make art that invites the viewer to share in the discomfort of not understanding.
Excerpt from the essay by Sam Lincoln
© Text and Photo Courtesy of Vardaxoglou Gallery, London.
