Vardaxoglou Gallery is pleased to present Eternity and a Day, an exhibition of five new large-scale paintings by Athens-based artist Sebastian Lloyd Rees (b. 1986, Stavanger, Norway). This is Sebastian Lloyd Rees’s first exhibition with Vardaxoglou Gallery, and the artist’s first solo exhibition in London for 6 years.

The exhibition comprises five paintings made between 2021 to 2023 in the artist’s Athens studio. Each painting measures eight foot tall by eight foot wide and is composed according to what at first seems to be a consistent formula, but quickly and vividly reveals its particularity—and, in that particularity, a poignant lyricism.

To capture the essence of intimacy each painting holds, and expanding on the artist’s interest in time and memory, the viewer will experience five acts throughout the exhibition and on visiting will be confronted with a single painting, changing each week the gallery reopens. 

The title references Theo Angelopoulos’s film Eternity and a Day, in which a middle-aged Greek writer is confronted by the question, “How long is tomorrow?”. In a search for answers, his journey becomes a passage to experience one final perfect day, to recapture the happiness of a day some 30 years earlier. 

Sebastian Lloyd Rees’s newest body of paintings also reflect the close ties the artist has had to the landscapes and places he has inhabited for more than ten years; in London, New York, and Athens. As a natural stroller and observer, the artist's daily occurrences become tangentially, poetically or aesthetically realised in this new cycle of paintings.

For further information please contact info@vardaxoglou.com.

About the artist

Sebastian Lloyd Rees (b. 1986, Stavanger, Norway) is based between Athens and London. Lloyd Rees studied at Goldsmiths where he received his BA in 2010 and is in an ongoing collaboration with Ali Eisa under the name Lloyd Corporation.

Sebastian Lloyd Rees’s painting became known for his use of found materials from the urban environment in his Hoarding Works (2014–2018); a series of paintings in which the artist repurposed the boards protecting construction sites of London and New York.

After moving to Athens in 2020, Lloyd Rees developed a new visual language in his painting, shifting from literal use of the urban environment to an approach informed by his physical place within the city. Athens, a vastly different city architecturally, provided a new set of compositional devices for Lloyd Rees. Painting acts as a visual diary of the artist’s daily occurrences and interactions, and observing new ways humans inhabit a city has informed the artist’s series of Black Paintings (2021–2023), presented for the first time at Vardaxoglou in 2023.