Current
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Exhibition: The Power of Green
Green is not a simple colour. It carries contradictions. Growth and decay, stillness and unease, the natural world, and something altogether more unsettling beneath it. In Ian Rayer-Smith's hands, it becomes a force rather than a shade. This collection brings together ten works in which green plays a defining role.... Read more -
Exhibition: No Rules
The most interesting decisions in painting happen at the point where convention runs out. Ian Rayer-Smith has always worked from that place. Not in opposition to tradition, but beyond it. Where the old masters end, the questions begin. This collection is the result of that thinking made visible. Works conceived... Read more -
Air Between Leaves
Some collections begin with an intention. This one began with several of them, years apart, but quietly accumulating until the paintings arrived. Ian Rayer-Smith spent several nights sleeping under the stars in the south of Portugal, a region with a spiritual quality that draws people from across the world in... Read more -
Whimsical Matters
Whimsical Matters grew out of Misdemeanour, a collection that marked a return to a more childlike approach to creativity, unrestricted, playful, and at times deliberately naughty. Where Misdemeanour was about freedom and mischief, Whimsical Matters took that same energy and let it breathe into something warmer. Something happier. The shift... Read more -
Signals
Something in the Signals collection arrived before Ian understood it. The forms emerged instinctively, away from the scale and pressure of his Manchester studio, painted in a quieter space in the English countryside where there was, as he puts it, nothing to perform. It took time before he began to... Read more -
Abstracted
The Abstracted collection works in the space between reality and imagination, where form, memory and emotion dissolve into something at once familiar and ungraspable. Recognisable shapes surface for a moment, then melt back into the canvas, much as a memory shifts each time it is recalled. Each painting is approached... Read more -
Misdemeanour
Misdemeanour is a study in playful rebellion. Colour, movement and an untamed energy run through every canvas, each one balanced between the innocence of instinct and the boldness of defiance. The paintings are made without rigid plans. One mark answers the last in an ongoing dialogue, a deliberate looseness that... Read more -
Trampling Over The Classics
Trampling Over the Classics is a conversation with art history conducted on equal terms. It borrows the emotional weight, compositional power and quiet grandeur of the Old Masters, then sets about dismantling them. Each work tends to begin with a nod to the source, a fragment of a figure, the... Read more -
Portraits
The portraits are not concerned with resemblance. They reach instead for presence. Faces surface from layers of paint and drawing, then partly withdraw, some marks kept, others removed, every history left visible at the surface. The gaze is suggested rather than fixed. A line can be tender or feral. A... Read more -
Renaissance Reconfigured
Renaissance Reconfigured takes the grace and balance of Renaissance painting and rebuilds it in a contemporary language. The work holds on to essence rather than appearance. Classical figures, architectural symmetry and luminous light all remain, but they arrive translated, through gestural brushwork, fractured composition and a palette that belongs entirely... Read more -
The Blue Period
The Blue Period reduces Ian Rayer-Smith's practice to a single chromatic force. Here blue is not simply colour. It is architecture, horizon and pulse. Cobalt and ultramarine are layered, lifted and reworked, light moving through the glazes while drawn marks and erasures hold the surface alive. The restraint of a... Read more -
Exhibition: Layers
Layers is concerned with what cannot be seen. Every painting begins long before the image that finally meets the eye, and rests on the work beneath it: the foundational marks and the middle passages that never reach the surface but shape everything that does. Those buried layers are where the... Read more
