Now Is Not Now - Solo Show

Now Is Not Now brings together a new body of paintings developed from my 2026 Berlin Artist Residency. The works draw on Renaissance era proverbs, particularly Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s 1559 painting Netherlandish Proverbs, and Goya’s Black Paintings, using absurd and symbolic imagery to look at human folly, contradiction and the strange theatre of contemporary life. Animals, figures and familiar cultural icons appear in dark, theatrical scenes where humour and unease sit close together, and where the absurdity of human behaviour becomes part of the work’s tension.

The exhibition considers how old warnings, moral failures and absurd patterns of behaviour keep repeating themselves in new forms. These paintings are not just illustrations of the past, but reflections on the present, a world where power, ego, desire, delusion and performance continue to circle back on themselves with a kind of tragic comedy. In this sense, Now Is Not Now sits somewhere between proverb, satire and comedy, a dark room of allegories for an era that feels both timeless and completely current.

Photography;
Drew McDonald
Davina Bambrick - @davinajbambrick