A landmark collaboration with Goodman Gallery marks a new chapter for Winston Branch, the Caribbean British painter, as he returns to large-scale works alive with colour, light and cultural history.
WINSTON BRANCH OBE: Out of the Calabash
27th November, 2025 – 14th January, 2026
Goodman Gallery
26-27 Cork Street
Mayfair
London
Goodman Gallery opens its first exhibition with Caribbean British artist Winston Branch OBE (b. 1947), presenting a new body of abstract paintings that probe the relationship between colour, light and space. The exhibition coincides with the gallery’s announcement of global representation of Branch, developed in partnership with Varvara Roza Galleries. It positions the artist, long admired for his vivid painterly language, firmly within contemporary art’s widening conversations around cultural collaboration and diasporic creativity.
Branch arrived in Britain from Saint Lucia in the 1960s at the age of twelve, later studying at the Slade School of Fine Art under Frank Auerbach, Euan Uglow, Keith Vaughan and Michael Andrews. London’s ferment of underground movements shaped his early practice, as the city became a nexus of counterculture and artistic innovation. Over the decades he worked in London, California, Germany and Italy, each location imprinting itself on his experiments with colour and spatial rhythm.
The new works mark a return to ambitious scale. Earlier canvases were defined by density, built through layers of paint that carried emotional weight. Recent paintings take a different turn: surfaces open up, gestures broaden and the compositions feel aerated. The tightly charged mark-making of the 1980s and 90s has evolved into sweeping brushstrokes that stretch across the canvas, creating a sense of expansion and luminous movement.
Winston Branch
Untitled, 2024
Acrylic on Canvas
Work: 270 x 230 x 3.5 cm (106.3 x 90.6 x 1.4 in.)
Goodman Gallery
Branch frequently works with the canvas laid on the floor, using his full body to apply paint. The resulting compositions unsettle traditional hierarchies of foreground and background. In Today is not a surprise, 2023, acrylic pigment settles boldly at the top of the frame, releasing pinkish sweeps that soften as they descend. Many of his untitled canvases from 2023 reveal colours that merge and disperse with an organic flow.
His position in British art is both historic and continually renewed. Branch’s first solo exhibition took place at the experimental Arts Lab in 1967, whose programme threaded together figures such as Jim Haynes, David Bowie, Roelof Louw, John Lennon and Yoko Ono. In 2024 he received the title of Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE), recognising his outstanding service to the arts. Yet his career has always extended beyond Britain. He participated in the First Pan-African Cultural Festival in Algeria in 1969 and represented Britain at FESTAC’77 in Lagos. His work has appeared in the 11th and 23rd São Paulo Biennials, the 4th Bienal de Pintura de Cuenca in Ecuador, the first Bienal Agentina de Grafika Latina America and the John F Kennedy Center in 1994.
See also
Branch’s turn to abstraction in 1982 signalled a decisive break from figuration and the Catholic iconography that informed his early work. His abstract canvases register what he calls “the humanity of colour”, a sensibility that aligns formal experimentation with a broader cultural shift away from conceptual austerity and towards work charged with joy, vitality and sensory immediacy.
Alongside his studio practice, Branch has shaped artistic education in influential ways, teaching at institutions including Kansas State University, the University of California at Berkeley and Goldsmiths, University of London. His impact is evident across generations of artists who continue to draw on his example, restless, expansive and committed to the expressive power of paint.
WINSTON BRANCH OBE: Out of the Calabash opens on the 27th of November, 2025 until the 14th of January, 2026 at Goodman Gallery
©2025 Goodman Gallery
Art Plugged is a contemporary platform inspired by a relationship with the broader arts communities. We provide our audience with curated insight into the world of art, from exhibitions to artist interviews and more.