Opening Reception: November 5, 2025 | 6 – 8 pm
On View: November 5 – December 20, 2025
October 27, 2025 (Cologne, Germany) – Gathering is pleased to present Brick boys, British artist Laurie Smith’s European debut solo exhibition at Gathering Cologne on view from November 5 – December 20, 2025. Laurie Smith renders his figures in perpetual motion, their bodies twisting, dancing, reaching restlessly towards their next thrill. Moving at a velocity that feels both exuberant and uneasy, his subjects’ puppet-like gestures recall Balthus, one of Smith’s twentieth-century touchstones, yet these are no marionettes. Smith’s characters pull their own strings, leaping and sprinting through the worlds he renders on canvas.
Set against the grey pavements of London, Smith’s newest works depict friends and lovers as they slip through the night. As his work moves into the city, Smith’s meticulous focus on architecture and bricks takes inspiration from Martin Wong’s paintings of his New York surroundings, marginal communities and urban gentrification. A recurrent theme for the artist is that of queer nightlife. Earlier this year, an exhibition of his paintings in London captured the intimate ballrooms and clubs of the city’s queer scene. Brick boys takes Smith’s exploration out of pubs, basements and warehouses and onto the streets, with London’s pavestones becoming liminal stages for new emotional and narrative possibilities.
The largest canvas in this exhibition nods to Balthus’s seminal painting The Street (1933), with nine figures adrift in their own psychic spheres, like actors performing separate dramas within a shared frame. Smith also draws on Giorgio de Chirico’s metaphysical paintings, works that picture eerily empty piazzas and ebb with a curious mix of stillness and suspense. Translating this atmosphere into a distinctly contemporary register, his distorted perspectives and receding architectures evoke spaces that are both melancholic yet alive with possibility.
Despite his firm grounding in traditional art history, a cinematic pulse also runs through Smith’s work, weaving in references to queer literature and film of the 1980s and 1990s, particularly works set in New York. These layered histories further inform the artist’s vision, situating his figures and the worlds they inhabit within the broader narrative of queer cultural memory.
As such, Brick boys sees Smith draw upon the lineages of modern painting, cinema and literature to forge a space distinctly his own: a space where movement, desire and reverie collide with the city itself. In Smith’s London, the streets pulse with the energy of transformation, an energy heavy with the grief of old selves yet illuminated by the joy of new beginnings.
NOTES TO EDITORS
Exhibition Details
Laurie Smith
Brick boys
November 5 – December 20, 2025
Opening Reception
November 5, 2025 | 6 – 8 pm
Opening Hours
Wednesday – Saturday | 12 pm – 6 pm
Closed on Sundays, Mondays & Tuesdays
Address
Roonstraße 108
50674 Cologne
About Laurie Smith:
Laurie Smith (b. 1994, Huddersfield, UK) is a London based-visual artist who paints scenes that blend fantasy, history and the painter’s own life. Harnessing a range of references – from historical portraiture, contemporary gay night life, 20th century photography and Impressionism – Smith recasts traditional techniques and subject matter through an autobiographical and queer lens. Drawing upon subjects from his own life, Smith documents the everyday using dimmed tones and layers of deep blue shadows characteristic of Edward Hopper and Francisco de Goya, seeking to capture the transitory states of desire, loneliness and our need for connection.
His exhibitions include Private Lives (2025) with Brunette Coleman in London; A Flower for a Heart (2024) with Painters Painting Paintings in London; Laurie Smith (2024) with diez gallery in Amsterdam; Parloir (2024) with Brunette Coleman in Tournai; Day by Day, Good Day (2023) with Union Pacific in London; Stranger Than Paradise (2022) with VO Curations in London and Sky-Blue and Green (2020) with VO Curations in London.
About Gathering:
Founded in 2022 in the heart of Soho, London, Gathering is a contemporary art gallery, presenting a diverse exhibition programme of international emerging voices alongside established artists, including Emanuel de Carvalho, Tamara K.E., Soojin Kang, Ndayé Kouagou, Wynnie Mynerva, Tai Shani and Oda Iselin Sønderland. In 2023, Gathering inaugurated GLASSHOUSE, an alternative strand of programming which fosters emergent creative practitioners alongside Gathering’s main exhibitions. In 2024, the gallery expanded to Sant Miquel de Balansat on the island of Ibiza, carrying the cutting-edge programming and artist-led ethos of Gathering to an international stage. Following its expansion to Ibiza in 2024, Gathering launched in Cologne, marking the next step in Gathering’s continued growth and dedication to supporting progressive artistic practices across Europe.
Image Credits:
1. Laurie Smith, Private Rituals, 2025. Oil on Canvas. 10 1/4 x 12 in. 26 x 30.5. Courtesy of Gathering and the artist. Photo: Ollie Hammick
2. Laurie Smith, Burn me into the skyline, 2025. Oil on Canvas. 10 x 12 in. 25.3 x 30.5. Courtesy of Gathering and the artist. Photo: Ollie Hammick
