Laurie Smith’s first solo exhibition in Europe, Brick Boys, at the Cologne outpost of London’s Gathering gallery, presents a melancholic painting show that invites the viewer more toward nostalgia than gloom. Drawing on masters like Balthus and Martin Wong, Smith captures intimate moments of nightlife trapped between the damp brick walls of London’s streets.
The exhibition at Gathering Cologne reveals how deeply Smith’s touch feeds on the stylistic gravity of Balthus. His largest work, Pavement Saints, directly references Balthus’s 1933 painting The Street. Yet where the Polish-French artist’s canvas is laced with violence and indifference, Smith approaches the same scene from a place of tenderness and intimacy. Even when his figures smirk or tease, they are never detached.
The Walk Home After the Night
This five-piece body of work may not feel particularly contemporary in terms of fashion or figure style, and although the exhibition text claims the paintings carry a “privileged contemporary record,” Smith’s images openly nod to popular subcultures of roughly thirty years ago and to the tradition of history painting.
Their real power lies in depicting those private moments of intimacy during the “walk home”—when the energy leaking from bars and clubs spills into suddenly quiet streets, frozen like snapshots. The contrast between the noise inside and the silence outside mirrors the characters’ limbo state, suspended between one gathering place and the next. This experience—claiming public space that is not equally welcoming to everyone—feels neither purely historical nor purely contemporary; it is utterly timeless.
Light, Movement, and the Documentary Gaze
Following his earlier 2025 show Private Lives, which focused on nightlife in enclosed spaces, Smith now moves his figures outdoors. In works such as Private Rituals and Pavement Saints, the protagonists emerge from the shadows—sometimes evoking the two children from the 1990 documentary Paris Is Burning.
In Pavement Saints, a millisecond has been caught as if translated directly from a photograph onto canvas: motion blur, micro-expressions, everything. Smith masterfully paints light bouncing off bricks, spilling from the brim of a cap, or pouring out of an illuminated window onto the street. A yellow-striped road divider slices through the scene like a flare guiding the saints; the same motif reappears in pieces such as City Fucks Back.
The artist assumes the role of documentarian: an invisible observer who captures his subjects dancing, walking, or leaning against a brick wall without altering their behavior.
As dawn climbs back into the sky and turns the night blue into a washed-out hue, the atmosphere shifts again. In Burn Me Into the Skyline, a running man squints into the light, his face pulled backward by wind-like brushstrokes. Here Smith leans into a more gestural, interactive style.
Working with thick layers and blocky, impressionistic strokes, Smith sits thematically somewhere between Balthus and Patrick Angus while possessing a voice entirely his own. Though the show is small, it manages to feel both vibrant and whispered at the same time. As the low winter sun in Germany sets during gallery hours, the outdoor scenes begin to mirror the exact tones of the paintings, turning the walk home after the exhibition into an unexpectedly inspiring extension of the work.
Exhibition Details
Artist: Laurie Smith
Exhibition: Brick Boys
Venue: Gathering Cologne
Dates: 5 November – 20 December 2025
