Hannah Brown | Song For Autumn | at Gainsborough's House

Hannah Brown (b.1977 Salisbury, UK) lives and works in east London. Brown has exhibited internationally from the USA to South Korea, and her work has been acquired by institutions including the State Art Collection of Ireland in Dublin and the V&A Museum.

The exhibition at Gainsborough's House brings together work made over the last three years. During this period, Brown has focused on painting corners of scrub and woodland found on the fringes of residential areas in east London and Devon, places she knows intimately. Often unlikely survivals of urban development, these pockets of nature are wedged between roads and housing. Brown deepens her familiarity with these sites by taking countless photographs, which she frequently manipulates with colour filters. An orange glow, which might initially suggest a mellow sunset, can on closer inspection lend an unnerving and sinister edge.

More than half the exhibition features paintings from her recent series inspired by the fragment of Epping Forest between Leytonstone and Wanstead, known as Hollow Pond. The three large showstoppers of the show, The Verge by James Lanenos. 3, 5 and 8, are painted with a Pre Raphaelite attention to detail and pattern. Four smaller works from the series, Sketches for James Lane (after Corot): Morning, Noon, Evening and Night, reveal her art historical influences more clearly.

Inspired by one of the greatest landscape artists in British art history, Brown also presents a new group of works made in dialogue with Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788). In one of his most celebrated paintings, now displayed in Trafalgar Square, Gainsborough depicted a scene on the outskirts of Great Cornard, two miles from his birthplace in Sudbury, showing villagers exercising their ancient right to gather wood and materials from the common land.

In Looking for Cornard Wood 4 (2025), Brown retains the overcast grey blue skies but, nearly 300 years later, captures a dramatically altered landscape in which the tall trees have given way to a more open terrain. Undergrowth that partly obscures the view beyond also appears in her new series Day for Dusk (Coast Path) (2025), inspired by a stretch of the north Devon coastline.