Blue Range: Fred Sorrell

Fred Levine is delighted to announce ‘Blue Range’, an upcoming solo presentation with Fred Sorrell. Sorrell’s new paintings were conceived during a residency at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, amid the Canadian wilderness. Beginning with colour studies and notes made in the landscape, Sorrell later returns to the studio to distill these observations into abstract compositions. The two activities remain distinct: one gathers experience, while the other transforms it through memory.

Built through carefully calibrated relationships of colour, form and ground, the paintings explore atmosphere, duration and mystery. Sorrell develops meticulous paintings that intensify the dynamic interplay of colour, using subtle tonal shifts to evoke an experience analogous to being in nature. Rather than presenting or describing a landscape, the works convey the fluid and emotional experience of looking or attending to the movement of studying how light travels through space, the distinction between the landscape and the one perceiving it begins to dissolve.

In this new series, interwoven forms are refined over many layers. Earth pigments are combined with oil paint and wax. Accumulating slowly, the paintings develop according to a rhythm connected to natural processes of growth and change. Playful details emerge within their carefully constructed compositions, binding materiality to feeling.

Although Sorrell’s paintings encapsulate highly personal and temporal perceptions of space, their titles often return the viewer to their points of inspiration. References to places, seasons or qualities of light keep the work connected to the natural world without fixing its meaning. Colour and form gradually establish their own relationships, allowing each part of the painting to act independently while contributing to a larger sense of interconnected space. These paintings suggest that through constraint, something incommunicable beyond ourselves can be shared.

Fred Sorrell (born 1984, London) studied at Falmouth School of Art from 2004 to 2008. Recent exhibitions include Expanding Landscapes: Painting After Land Art 2, Abbot Hall (2025); Landscapes of Time and Memory, Fred Levine Gallery (2025); Seem Both Distant and So Close, Warbling Collective (2025); Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Canada (2024); and Antidote, Informality Gallery, London (2024). Previous solo exhibitions include Ember (2022) and Long Tide (2020), both at Parafin, London.