UNSTABLE GROUNDS
Kearsey & Gold, London
October 2025
Julian Lombardi, Shane Keisuke Berkery, Frank Auerbach,
James Brooks, R.B Kitaj, Markus Lüpertz, Henry Moore & Graham Sutherland
STREET THEATRE,2025
THE ORCHESTRA,2025
ALGORITHMIC HUNGER,2025
UNTITLED,2025
UNTITLED,2025
Kearsey and Gold is pleased to present Unstable Grounds, an exhibition that unites the paintings of contemporary artists Julian Lombardi (b.1996, Philadelphia) and Shane
Keisuke Berkery (b.1992, Tokyo) in dialogue with Frank Auerbach, James Brooks, R.B Kitaj, Markus Lüpertz, Henry Moore and Graham Sutherland.
Julian Lombardi is an American painter from Philadelphia and currently based in London. Lombardi earned his MA in painting from the Royal College of Art. Lombardi utilises
abstract forms that delve into the spatialisation of psychological and sensory experiences. Lombardi’s visual language is marked by gestural lines, protean forms, and vivid passages of colour, often incorporating tubular motifs.
During a residency with Kearsey & Gold, Lombardi has developed a process that incorporates digital manipulations into the painting process. He begins with a background of gestural mark making and passages of colour; this background is digitised and manipulated to create a series of layers that serve as the framework for the midground and foreground. A deliberate painterliness underlies the digitally manipulated forms that reminds us that within the interconnectivity, integration of AI and distortion of information we are still human - albeit in a faster and more fraught world.
Shane Keisuke Berkery is a contemporary Irish-Japanese painter with an MA in painting from the Royal College of Art. Berkery utilises photography, drawing and digitally manipulated compositions to create paintings that blur the boundaries between past and present, intertwining art history with personal, familial and cultural histories. This manifests in complex visual imagery that defy linear narratives. This complexity represents the strangeness of our world whilst acting as a meditation on Berkery’s unconscious mind.
The inclusion of works by Auerbach, Brooks, Kitaj, Lüpertz, Moore and Sutherland draws parallels to Berkery and Lombardi’s psychological fragmentations in their attempt to negotiate a changing world. In the 20th century the context was a post-war climate marked by displacement and loss. To rebuild - and to make sense of a new world - there was a
fundamental need to materialise their battles, both personal and collective, through innovative approaches to subject, forms, and figure. Berkery and Lombardi continue this approach in our own time. Specifically, in relation to the ever-growing grip of technology and its effects on
human subjectivity.
Click here for more information