Brett Charles Seiler
occasional lovers
Solo exhibition
May 1 – June 20, 2026
Opening: Friday, 1 May, 6 – 9pm
Gallery Weekend Berlin 1 – 3 May 2026
The Leipzig gallery is barrier-free. A a wheelchair ramp is on site.
Please contact us in case of any further questions at +49-341-9607886.
Have a look into the flyer with exhibition text, short biography and selected images:
EXHIBITION FLYER
We are pleased to announce the current exhibition occasional lovers by Brett Charles Seiler, which opens on Friday, 1 May, at 6 p.m. at our Berlin gallery as part of Gallery Weekend Berlin.
In occasional lovers, Brett Charles Seiler transcribes the tensions of noncommittal encounters. Figuring a succession of visitors to his studio in large-scale compositions and smaller studies, his ‘midday, midnight, and morning-after’ paintings have about them a sense of disquiet. Where his early works showed moments of shared intimacy and lust, the characters now appear distracted and dejected, their expressions deadpan. There is something unsettling about the word ‘occasional’, the artist suggests. ‘There are secrets and shadows, there is shame.’
Made with the reduced palette of bitumen black, roof-paint and chalk white, and raw canvas that has become Seiler’s signature style, the works are coloured with a muted nostalgia. Of his subjects, the artist speaks with tenderness of ‘my people’, listing a cast of friends and muses – Clemence, Felix, Prince, Bradley, Lukas, Adam, and Terence, among others – a Bouquet Of Boys (David and his friend, whose name is also David), as one work is titled. There are two women, too, who bend the rule. The portraits seldom share a close resemblance to their sitters: they are not descriptions of individuals, Seiler says, but rather recollections of time spent together in the studio, embellished by memory and self-referential asides. His practice, he suggests, is predicated on a certain urgency: to forget no one, exclude nothing, to remember this place, these people, the feeling of it all.
In Seiler’s studio tableaux, the likenesses of his figures are rehearsed in sketches tacked to the wall or inscribed on incidental props, alongside allusions to previous works and freefloating images borrowed from different settings. Like that of the artist’s real studio, the floors he describes in paint reveal a state of mind, tracing the subconscious and the surreal between the bottles of turpentine, paint pots, buckets, and brushes that punctuate his scenes.
‘The studio is a force, a place where things are lost only later to be found,’ Seiler says. It is also a lover of a kind, he suggests, constant rather than casual, a character all its own.
Distinct from his larger portraits, Seiler’s pared-back studies – liminal and only vaguely libidinal – offer fleeting impressions of the same sitters seen in isolation. Most are given as busts, few as framed fragments (a crotch, a torso, a backside). Pictured against the unarticulated ground that is as much a feature of these works as their figuration, the individuals appear all the more uncertain and exposed. The surrounding emptiness is not so much an absence of context, Seiler suggests, as ‘a space to negotiate the independent self’.With nowhere to hide, the figures are left wanting and waiting.
In addition to his paintings, a series of motifs quoted in the artist’s studio compositions are reprised as wood-carved objects in the gallery: Cock soda bottles, cans of Spite, half-smoked cigarettes, and apples – all suggestive of oral fixations, but also consumerism’s manufactured desires, forbidden pleasures, and romantic betrayals. These are accompanied by found suitcase assemblages, recalling both the essential restlessness that has defined much of Seiler’s peripatetic life and the anticipation of visiting – or leaving – a love interest. The artist’s aphorisms, transcribed in his portraits or given as standalone pieces, lend inflexions of brevity to the otherwise subdued register of his paintings. Pairing irony and pathos, these one-liners ask after queer masculinity and the promises and perils of promiscuity, with wry after-the-after-party clarity. Unfaithful me making out with unfaithful you, one reads; Wank and cry, reads another.
Entering the exhibition, the viewer steps into a restaging of Seiler’s studio, becoming just another figure in the crowd, an occasional lover among countless others. Slip off your shirt, pick up a cigarette, try not to choke on an apple. Come and go, touch and gone.
– Lucienne Bestall
