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05 2026
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19/03/2026
Exhibitions
Sinead Breslin

Friends Looking at Friends

Curated by George Nelson
Friends Looking at Friends presents new portraits of the artist’s friends and family, interspersed with delicate, playful still lifes. Breslin’s practice—concerned with identity, home, motherhood, and relationships—has taken on a more conscious and reflective approach in recent years. After spending five years between New York and Mexico City, the artist returned to London in 2019, reconnecting with her childhood home. She established a studio at London Fine Art Studios in Lavender Hill, where she met artist and teacher Mark Chen, who became an important guide in refining her observation from life and working from direct drawing.
Today, Breslin combines these tools with a free, expressive brushstroke, an eye for the unexpected, and a confident use of color, producing vivid works that examine contemporary life through undertones of social tension, Catholic iconography, and human connection. Isolated figures inhabit interiors and saturated landscapes, suspended in abstract collages of time and place. At once contemplative and unsettling, these scenes evoke intimate spaces of memory, with protagonists who at times meet the viewer’s gaze with desire, intensity, or unease. Breslin acknowledges formative encounters with painters such as Poussin, whose compositional strategies and object placement inform her layered spatial constructions.
Her work also engages in dialogue with historical figures including Matisse, Morandi, Neel, and Freud, alongside contemporary influences such as Katz, Party, and Joffe. A direct exchange with Katz—who painted her portrait in New York—reinforced her understanding of the figure as a vehicle for painterly expression, where strength lies in the brushwork rather than in narrative content. Breslin deconstructs interiors and landscapes with irony and lightness, creating painterly collages of time and space that strongly recall religious iconography: central figures emerge surrounded by symbolic gestures and patterns.
Raised in a Catholic environment, the artist notes how the visual theatricality of Catholicism continues to inhabit her subconscious, recalling childhood experiences of light, color, and fractured perspectives encountered while sitting in church. In Bobby and Nigoria, Breslin captures a quiet, introspective moment between two friends in a house in Somerset, constructing “worlds within worlds” through paintings nested inside paintings, like visual matryoshkas. In Race Day, her brother Joseph appears beside one of her mother’s greyhounds, set within a dramatic, atmospheric landscape that heightens the emotional charge of the scene.
Domestic motifs—tables, food, and interiors—recur throughout the exhibition: in Megan in the Kitchen, an apple alludes to temptation, while in Breakfast Table, a ripe plum, an egg, and a phallic-shaped sausage evoke fertility and everyday ritual, reflecting the political, economic, and social uncertainties of the present.