Works on Paper

albertz benda, New York
April 9 - May 16, 2026

New York, NY | albertz benda is pleased to present Works on Paper, Christopher Le Brun's fifth solo exhibition with the gallery, on view from April 9 to May 16, 2026. It will be the first exhibition in the US to focus solely on his paintings on paper, revealing the generative exchange between drawing, printmaking, and painting – all three processes essential to Le Brun’s practice.

Le Brun belongs to an illustrious lineage of painter-draftsmen for whom paper is a medium of creative renewal, where the artist’s intention is intimately revealed and the exchange between thought and mark most immediate.

Charged with lyrical intensity, the works on view pair the freedom that paper has always afforded Le Brun with the full richness of his painting. For Le Brun, paper is not a neutral base, it is a found object of sorts. Most of these paintings begin with a trial proof - an initial print pulled from a woodblock or etching plate - which he then layers with oil paint. “I like the paper itself much too much to throw away all those promising beginnings and near misses…heavy paper is very robust and can easily support the unlimited further work and thinking time that making a lasting work of art may require.”

Le Brun's larger canvases call for the viewer to move through the composition: painting as a heightened physical and emotional encounter. The works on paper operate differently; scaled to the human body, they carry the intimacy of their making into the act of viewing. The contained scale does not preclude complexity or subtlety: shifts of color and richness of surface texture reveal themselves slowly.

Recurring motifs run throughout Works on Paper . An enduring image in Le Brun’s early practice, the sphere is at once a compositional and symbolic presence. It reappears here transformed by abstraction yet grounded in direct observation. Since relocating to Somerset in 2022, Le Brun's attunement to the natural world has deepened through immersion. The grid, meanwhile, operates as a mark that has become central to his work over the past decade, in these works drawn directly onto the surface with a paint tube.

With Works on Paper, we are offered a cipher into Le Brun's oeuvre - not through preparatory drawings or studies, but through paintings on paper, each a layered record of accumulation and revelation.

"Many things that I most value from all periods happen to have been made on paper, simply because that was to hand, and with little thought at the time of what to do with them or what they were for. Paradoxically, in the long run, that may have preserved an element of truth."

For further information please contact albertz benda
All images copyright Christopher Le Brun DACS
Work photography by Stephen White and Co.