Christopher Le Brun’s “The Mind’s Weather” at Lisson Gallery, London: Suns, Chalk and the Return of the Visible

Weather is the one subject every English painter eventually has to face. Constable sketched clouds on Hampstead Heath with the date and wind direction pencilled on the back; Turner turned storms into pure colour. Christopher Le Brun’s “The Mind’s Weather” at Lisson Gallery, London, which opens on 19 November 2026, takes up that inheritance from the inside. The weather in question is mental as much as meteorological — and the forecast, after two decades of abstraction, includes suns, moons and a chalk pit on the South Downs.

A painter who ran the Royal Academy

Born in Portsmouth in 1951, Le Brun belongs to the generation that put painting back at the centre of European art in the early 1980s; he was included in “Zeitgeist” in Berlin in 1982, the exhibition that announced the return of large, ambitious figurative canvases. He later served as President of the Royal Academy of Arts from 2011 to 2019 and was knighted for services to the arts. His work is held by Tate, the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the British Museum.

That institutional CV can obscure what kind of artist he is in the studio. Le Brun is, above all, a painter’s painter — someone for whom the material itself is the argument. In the text accompanying the show he puts it simply: “Encountering the beauty of the materials in unending combinations is enough.”

What “changeability” means here

Lisson frames the exhibition as a large sequence of new canvases built on a lifetime of thinking about painting’s fundamentals: surface against depth, tone against light, memory against imagination. The title, the gallery explains, points to the part that changeability — an openness to being altered as one works — plays in his practice. That is a useful key. A Le Brun canvas is rarely planned to a finish; it is weathered into existence, layer over layer, until an image settles or refuses to.

What is new, according to Galleries Now’s preview, is the direction of travel. After roughly twenty years in which his surfaces leaned towards abstraction, the recent works move back towards representation. Sun-like discs appear with moons, planets and stars; landscapes surface, among them The Chalk Pit (2026), a reimagining of the South Downs.

Inside the exhibition

The titles reported by FAD Magazine read like a set of field notes: Field Poem IX and Field Poem VI, Quarry, Press (Sun Notes IV), Pastoral (Numbered Landscape I), Act and Almost Downland (Sun Notes V), all from 2026. Galleries Now also reproduces Sun Notes III (2026), an oil on canvas measuring 200 × 160 cm. Quarry, shown above, stretches to 140 × 260 cm — a horizontal format that invites the eye to walk across it as one might cross open downland.

Notice the vocabulary. “Field”, “pastoral”, “downland” and “quarry” are the language of the English landscape tradition; “notes” and “numbered” suggest the provisional, serial character of studies. Le Brun seems to be testing how much of the visible world a painting can admit before it stops being about paint. A fully illustrated catalogue accompanies the show, with an essay by Barry Phipps titled “The Landscape Thinks Itself”.

Lisson and the London context

Lisson Gallery, founded in 1967 and based in the streets behind Marylebone station, built its reputation on Minimal and Conceptual art and on generations of British sculptors. A painter of Le Brun’s lyrical temperament is in some ways an unexpected fit — which is precisely what makes the pairing interesting. This winter London is unusually rich in painting shows, and “The Mind’s Weather” offers a counterweight to younger figurative painters: a senior artist asking what representation can still do when it is earned slowly, through the surface, rather than imported from a photograph or a screen.

Why it matters

• For collectors: a substantial body of new work from an artist in the Tate, MoMA and British Museum collections, presented with a dedicated catalogue — the kind of moment that often defines a late period.
• For painters: a masterclass in how tone and layered surface can carry an image to the point of recognition and then hold it there, undecided.
• For anyone interested in British art: a living link between the Constable–Turner tradition, the 1980s painting revival and painting today.

Visiting information

Lisson Gallery, London. Galleries Now gives the venue as 27 Bell Street, NW1 5BY, with an opening on Thursday 19 November 2026, 18:00–20:00; Lisson also operates 67 Lisson Street, so check which space hosts the show. Lisson’s exhibitions listing gives the run as 19 November 2026 – 13 February 2027, while the exhibition page reads 20 November – 6 February — please confirm before visiting. Open Tuesday to Saturday 11:00–18:00 and by appointment; phone +44 (0)20 7724 2739, email [email protected]. See our The Mind’s Weather listing, the official Lisson Gallery exhibition page, and more shows on Upcoming Art Exhibitions in Leading Galleries.