Dickon Drury

Kendall Koppe and Seventeen are pleased to present Dickon Drury's third and first solo exhibition with the galleries, respectively.

The two exhibitions, The Preceding Cart and POV: You Are Beans, exist as distinct bodies of new work, exhibited concurrently. In the spirit of exchange, collaboration, and expanded dialogue between galleries and artists, the exhibition takes place at Seventeen, London.

The Preceding Cart

Using unconventional framing devices and complex compositional decision-making, Drury is going through the gears with this group of new paintings. In reference to John Kelsey’s idea of ‘painting in reverse’, the exhibition title alludes to the idiom ‘cart before the horse’, and invites us to reflect on the process of doing things counter-intuitively, or simply in the wrong order. Ropes, strings and nets, knit themselves throughout this group of paintings. These act as visual stumbling blocks which serve to disjoint the images, slowing both the painter and the viewer’s progress.

The work Understanding Intervals (2025) presents a grand, golden harp, its vertical strings slicing through the sunlit garden room beyond. Partially obscured by the strings, the background is constructed in the strips of space between the notes. The strings themselves are formed of negative space. The room is populated with myriad pots, empty of plants but full of void-like soil. The subject of this painting isn't the harp, or maybe not the harp at all, but rather, empty space and the function it serves within painting.

Drury often employs flatness and awkward perspectives in his paintings. In Preparing to Fail (2025) a grid of carefully positioned supplies is arranged on a terrazzo floor, some standing upright, some laid out as if seen from above. The image of a rudimentary trap occupies the centre of the painting. Referencing Pieter Brueghel's Winter Landscape with a Bird Trap (1565) and echoing an arduous past, the snowy scene points us toward a potential future that is being prepared for. Coupled with Drury's assortment of supplies, we may consider our own preoccupation with preparation.

Dickon Drury (b. 1986, Salisbury) lives and works in Cornwall. He is a graduate of the Slade School of Fine Art and a recipient of the Slade School of Fine Art, Desiree Painting Prize (2016).

Notable solo exhibitions include: An Egg In Your Shoe at Shulamit Nazarian , Los Angeles (2023); If you see me, then weep Galleri Opdahl, Stavanger, Norway (2023); Time Flies Like an Arrow, Fruit Flies Like a Banana at Kendall Koppe, Glasgow (2021); Dickon Drury, Condo London, Koppe Astner at Carlos Ishikwa, London (2020); To Be The Key, Galleri Opdhal, Stavanger (2019); Tennis Elbow, The Journal Gallery, New York (2018); Holed Up, Galleri Opdhal, Stavanger (2018); If The Sea Was Whiskey, Frutta Gallery, Rome (2017); The Who’s Who of Whos, Koppe Astner, Glasgow (2016); Optics Don’t Make Marks, Spike Island Project Space, Bristol (2008)

Selected group exhibitions include: Blunk, Stavanger Kunstmuseum, Stavanger (2023); Midnight Murmurs, Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles (2022); My Kid Could’ve Done That!, The Edge, Bath (2021); Generation Y, Platform Foundation, London (2019).