An elbow brushed the breezeblock. The four blocks looked precarious. Pretty in their brightness, but precarious in their balance. The gallery-goer took their glass of private view white wine to their mouth and in doing so pulled their elbow away from David Batchelor’s Concreto-Concreto 11 (2024). The stack of yellow, purple, sky blue, and red collaged concrete blocks remained safely on its plinth.

Like romantically stacked stones on a mountaintop, but more brutalist in nature, Batchelor had spraypainted these irregularly hewn building blocks. The colours are key, turning mundane lumps of construction into art object by virtue of a carefully selected and contrasted palette. Batchelor’s career has all been about colour, not just in an art practice that has crossed countless mediums, but also in writing – his book Chromophobia, published in 2000, which considers colour through Western culture is just one of several writings on the theme, including his editorship of the Whitechapel Gallery/MIT Press reader, Colour.




At the deepest part of the small gallery, tucked away around a corner and with its own small ledge, sits a small bookmark-sized strip of pattern. Early Bead Work (1970) has an intricate floral motif, created during the artist’s “hippy years”, it now forms the starting inspiration for New Skin for the Old Ceremony, Batchelor’s exhibition at Cecilia Brunson Projects.

There are other bead works on show, but the piece from 54 years ago is not only markedly different in its comparatively muted colours, but also in scale. The four other beaded pieces are far, far larger – the biggest is 50x60cm and fills most of a wall.

While the 1970s beads were made by Batchelor himself, many of the newer works on show were created by London craftswomen and drawn from techniques found in Marrakech and Guadalajara. The beads shown here were meticulously sewn by Lauren Godfrey with support from Scarlett Bunce, the piece acting as translation from the artist’s drawings and colour studies. It’s not uncommon for artists to have makers, fabricators, and artisans to make or contribute to works, but rarely are the workers acknowledged or named, so to see the network of skill clearly stated is welcome.




Nearby are two quilts – made by Catherine-Marie Longtin – are also striking through thoughtfully composed colours. At first glance, the hanging works look flat, but up close there is a detail borne of the material and process: cotton and nylon has attracted fluff, the handmadeness can be seen in the stitching, and tiny rough edges remind of the processes of making.

These bead and quilt pieces pose a delicate lightness against the concrete on plinths and ripped paper collages gridded across the largest wall. Above, two small vinyl patterns are affixed to glass rooflights, easy to miss on at the early-evening private view but no doubt much more present in the space when (if?) the London sun pierces through to shoot the coloured pattern into the space and across the physical works. Deployed across both gentle and lumpen material, made solid and ephemeral, a clash of colours fills the space.

In Chromophobia, Batchelor argued that in Western culture colour has been “relegated to the realm of the superficial” and is considered a cosmetic, not critical, quality. His career has been to push, promote, and play with colour in all its forms to fight this relegation, and having been testing and forming in colour for three decades, this show suggests that the artist’s curiosity shows no sign in letting up.