Duarte Sequeira is pleased to announce the first solo exhibition in Portugal by English painter Nell Brookfield (b. 1994, London, UK), Real Plastic Roses opening on 13 May in Braga. Brookfield’s work considers imagined and metaphorical states in relation to themes of love, tenderness, anxiety and pain.

Real Plastic Roses will feature a new body of work exploring imagined situations drawn from Brookfield's personal experiences, memories, and emotions. Centered on body language, her compositions encourage viewers to imagine what might lie beyond the edge of the canvas and include a consistent colour palette that creates a feeling of movement and texture.

Completed through a layering of natural pigments mixed by Brookfield herself with acrylic paint onto linen or cotton canvases, each work has an individual texture and patterned surfaces. The exhibition will feature 11 paintings of varied scale and a number of small watercolours that are created from visual research or initial sketchbook ideas. Evoking an uncanny, yet warm and inviting feeling, Brookfield creates scenes based on both real-life observations and imaginary scenarios creating moments of stillness in potentially chaotic moments.

Within each of the paintings, Brookfield invites the audience to find a space in which they are able to insert themselves in the moment and see their own world within the work, recognising something about their life and seeing and thinking about it from a new perspective. Following her solo presentation at Duarte Sequeira, Nell Brookfield will participate in the gallery ́s group presentation at Art Busan Art Fair (Busan, S. Korea) in May 2023.

Nell Brookfield (b. 1994, London, UK) is an artist living and working in London. The artist received a BS in Anthropology from the University College London in the UK, a postgraduate MA-Level from the Royal Drawing School in London, UK, and attended Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York, from 2019-2020. Brookfield has been an artist in residence at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, Rhode Island; the Borgo Pignano Painting Residency with the Royal Drawing School in Volterra Pisa, Italy; and the Royal Drawing School in London, England. Selected Exhibitions include: September Gallery, New York; Niru Ratnam Gallery, London, UK; Tabula Rasa Gallery, Beijing, China; Linseed Projects, Shanghai, China; Eve Leibe Gallery, London, UK; Guts Gallery, London, UK; Royal Drawing School, London, UK; Christie’s Auction House, London, UK; Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, New York; Crypt Gallery, London, UK.