Thomas Brezing

Wexford Arts Centre is pleased to present All the People We Will Never Meet, a solo exhibition by Thomas Brezing, curated by Cherry Smyth. The exhibition will run in the lower and upper galleries from Saturday, 10th October, to Wednesday, 16th December, 2026.

This exhibition grew out of a 15-year correspondence between Thomas Brezing and Cherry Smyth, founded in their common addiction to painting and poetry. Brezing introduces a potent and tender series of ‘Head Paintings’, 2020-2026, beside earlier large paintings, 2008-2020, which establish his themes of transcendence and obliteration. In the large canvases, representational motifs, such as birds and trees, vie for attention amid a frenzy of expressive abstraction. The colourful profusion of almost fantastical urban architecture, featuring ziggurats, subways and bridges, threatens to overcome faint human figures. Through tactile layers and spots of bright impasto, these exuberant works celebrate wild, joyful sentience.

Brezing’s new ‘Head Paintings’ are also marked by an anarchic vibrancy of colour. They stretch the confines of figurative portraiture, spinning the image out in expressionistic brushstrokes before arriving at a slower, more gestural abstraction. Together, they seem to approximate our days and nights of frantic scrolling, measuring faces, comparing, seeking mirrors, until the frenzy folds into a blur of non-recognition. Some heads, wracked by side swipes of paint, suggest the terror of war and mutilation. Yet resilience is firmly wrought by traces of survival where Brezing locates the strength of our common humanity. ‘They are experiential paintings,’ says Brezing. ‘Life experience brought me here. Dissolving panic.’

The lively exchange between Brezing’s imagined characters draws on emotional states that pass from resolution to disintegration and back again. Some appear like some Old Testament Book of Faces: the prophets and wandering pilgrims of our screens, desperate for followers. Others seem quasi-paramilitary or simply goofy or cartoonish. Are these edgy critiques of toxic masculinity, or pulpy portraits of mental torment? They can look as haunted as Adam and Eve by Masaccio, or conjure the aghast grandeur of Goya. They are living, breathing creatures, our pets and monsters.

Cherry Smyth is an Irish writer, living in London. Her fifth poetry collection One Mountain: Sold, Arlen House Press, 2025, examines the devastating effects of a proposed gold mine in the Sperrins, County Tyrone and presents other new poems that evolve out of her concerns for how we interrelate with each other, the environment and ethics. One Mountain: Sold, the performance, is touring with Irish vocalist Lauren Kinsella and musician Dan Nicholls. Famished (Pindrop Press, 2019) a book-length poem, explores the Irish Famine and how imperialism helped cause the largest refugee crisis of the 19th century and toured with Lauren Kinsella and composer Ed Bennett. Thomas Brezing and Cherry Smyth will give a joint reading from their published poetry and be in conversation during the exhibition run. Further details to be announced.