Cahiers d’Art is honoured to present Winston Branch: The Luminous Gesture, the artist’s first personal exhibition in France since his 1982 solo presentation at the Musée d’Art Moderne during the 12th Biennale de Paris, where he represented Saint Lucia. This landmark exhibition introduces Parisian audiences to Branch’s luminous abstractions—paintings that shift between opacity and radiance, turbulence and serenity—reflecting a decades-long meditation on light, memory, and place. Spanning both spaces at Cahiers d’Art, 14 and 15 rue du Dragon, the show presents work from the early 1980s to the present, tracing the evolution of his abstraction.

Born in Saint Lucia in 1947, Branch studied at the Slade School of Fine Art (UCL) before forging a singular path in contemporary abstraction. His work, held in the collections of Tate Britain, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the British Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art in São Paulo, demonstrates a masterful command of color and gesture. Through textured surfaces and subtle tonal shifts, his compositions emerge from the canvas, evoking landscapes both real and imagined. His practice navigates the intersections of memory, history, and the materiality of paint. Pulsing with vibrant chromatic intensity, his works also reflect a deep engagement with post-war abstraction—layered surfaces, gestural spontaneity, and a search for transcendence through form.

Examining the interplay of darkness and illumination—both formally and conceptually—his paintings reveal hidden depths beneath radiant surfaces. Light becomes a dynamic force, dissolving color into atmosphere and transforming sensation into structure. A recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, the Prix de Rome, and the Berlin Artist Program (DAAD), Branch has exhibited widely. This exhibition marks a significant return to Paris, reconnecting with the city since his early participation in the Salon de Jeunes Peintures at the Grand Palais in 1971, which initiated his long association with the Alliance Française. His work stands as a testament to abstraction’s enduring power to convey emotion and transcendence.

At Cahiers d’Art, his paintings unfold like visual poems, rich with radiant gestures and ephemeral light. They invite contemplation, where movement and stillness, presence and absence, coexist in delicate balance. A lifelong engagement with abstraction, keen observation, and lived experience converge in these works, where colour and texture create unexpected visual rhymes and resonances. Deep and sustained looking reveals a nuanced multiplicity of meanings.

Shaped by his experience of moving between London, Berlin, Europe, Latin America, and the USA, his work reflects an ongoing practice of gathering inspiration from the places he has lived and visited. This sense of movement, of taking elements from one place to another, is embedded in his creative process. The painting “Zachary II”, for instance, travelled with him across the world before its acquisition by the Tate in 2017.

Branch has also been an artist-in-residence at Fisk University, Nashville, and a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. His contributions to art and education have earned him distinguished honours, including The Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (OBE), an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts from the University of Greenwich, and recognition from the Organization of American States.

The Luminous Gesture at Cahiers d’Art affirms his place among the foremost abstract painters of his generation, offering a revelatory encounter with an artist whose work continues to evolve, surprise, and illuminate.

Winston Branch is a prominent abstract painter whose work engages with the materiality of colour, gesture, and form. After training at the Slade School of Fine Art, Branch’s early figurative works, informed by his Caribbean heritage, transitioned in the late 1970s to a more radical abstraction. His paintings—characterized by dynamic, layered colour fields—embody a tension between meditative stillness and energetic movement, often evoking elements of nature without succumbing to literal representation.

Branch’s approach to abstraction resists easy categorization, and his oeuvre has been shaped by a rigorous, autonomous commitment to the medium. Drawing upon global experiences, including residencies in Rome, Berlin, New York, and his tenure as a professor at Fisk University, Branch has remained deeply independent of prevailing artistic trends. His philosophy, which prioritizes the intrinsic language of painting over identity politics, underscores a universal approach to the craft. Branch’s return to St Lucia in the late 1990s signified his ongoing dedication to the act of painting as a site of transcendence and emotional expression.

Branch’s work occupies an important place in the history of British abstraction, his canvases evoking both an intellectual and sensory engagement with the material world. He continues to affirm that the essence of painting lies in its ability to convey feeling and substance, asserting that “if it ain’t got no feeling, it ain’t got no substance.”

Artist CV