Lucy Waterson of Apollo in conversation with Stewart Geddes and Freeny Yianni at TM Gallery in October 2026
‘The paintings dictate me rather than the other way round,’ the Bristol-based artist Stewart Geddes (b. 1961) has said of his work. Geddes’s vivid, swirling abstractions are the result of intuition and deliberation rather than any pre-determined plan, with each burst of action on the canvas determining the nature of the next layer of paint. The fruits of this process can be seen in ‘Kairos’, an exhibition of Geddes’s paintings at TM Gallery in London, curated by Freeny Yianni, founder of CLOSE Gallery in Somerset. At TM Gallery on 22 October, Geddes and Yianni spoke to Lucy Waterson of Apollo about why this exhibition marks an important moment in Geddes’s career.
Geddes began by discussing how he became interested in art, reflecting on being introduced to the work of the Impressionists as a schoolboy and feeling ‘moved by the material of paint’. Education emerged as one of the key topics of the conversation as Geddes discussed his years studying at institutions including the Canterbury College of Art (now part of the University for the Creative Arts) and the Royal College of Art, where he relished working alongside other artists: ‘The things that you learned were as much from each other as they were from the members of staff.’ Geddes later became a staffer himself, working as head of painting at the Cardiff School of Art and Design and taking on teaching roles at other art schools in the UK; he also served as president of the Royal West of England Academy from 2016–19. He continued working on his own art while teaching, saying that ‘getting my hands dirty informed me about what the students were doing’, but after decades in education – and wrestling with its administrative demands – he decided in 2019 to turn his attention solely to his own art.
This, said Yianni, had a transformative effect on his work – something she realised on a recent visit to Geddes’s studio. ‘I walked in, sat down and went, “Oh wow. This work knows what it is now. This work has arrived.”’ That sense of arrival is at the core of ‘Kairos’, which comprises many of the paintings Yianni saw on that trip to the studio. The show takes its title from an ancient Greek word meaning ‘the right or critical moment’ – a word both Geddes and Yianni felt befitted this exhibition.
The conversation went on to focus on various elements of Geddes’s practice, from how he decides on the size of his paintings to the number of paintings he works on at once and how he can tell when a piece is finished. Geddes discussed the necessity to ‘get away’ from a painting to ‘reflect upon it’, and the importance of ‘trying to gain the objectivity that an uninvolved party would have’. Two smaller paintings in the exhibition, DELLIS and PARGILLA (both 2026), comprise only a few strokes of a paint in a single colour against a white background. Seen next to some of Geddes’s larger works, in which layers of paint are built up through sweeping gestures and splatters, the simple paintings are ‘very revealing about the confidence that Stewart is feeling in his practice now’, said Yianni.
For those wanting to learn more about Geddes’s work, the full talk can be viewed here.
‘Kairos’ is at TM Gallery, London, until 16 December.
