Prescient Nature

8 February 2024 - 2 March 2024

Philip Braham’s title Prescient Nature speaks to the ecology of the future, how an icy forest, or landscape billowed in snow, or the reflection of winter trees in still water are not raw materials available for man’s disposal, but closer to the philosophy of Martin Heidegger’s realm of sky, earth, mortal and divine with the artist an agent in aletheia, the disclosure of truth. Braham makes beautiful paintings, beauty, a human perception, all the more poignant given its fragility. Guy Peploe

Listen to Philip Braham’s podcast here to learn more about his work and practice.

Born: 1959
Place of Birth: Glasgow

A graduate of Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, Philip Braham first came to prominence in the 1980s with the rise of figurative painting in Scotland, which culminated in The Vigorous Imagination, an exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in 1987. His career includes 27 solo exhibitions to date; in addition to numerous group shows both nationally and internationally. Among the awards received are the prestigious Royal Scottish Academy Guthrie Award for painting and the Royal Scottish Academy Morton Award for lens-based work. Recent exhibitions include solo shows at Perth Museum and Art Gallery, The Scottish Gallery and at the Royal Scottish Academy. A longstanding interest in continental aesthetics informs his pedagogical role as Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Art Practice at the University of Dundee. He was elected to the Royal Scottish Academy in 2021.

Braham’s paintings are informed by the Northern European engagement with landscape as a metaphor for the human condition. Recent projects reflect on the temporal nature of our existence through personal recollection and collective history, set within the slowly evolving landscape that bears us forward. Fidelity to experience is fundamental to his practice, and this brings a poetic grace to his technical mastery of oil painting.

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