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brave one is an online viewing room that showcases only one artwork at a time, for one month.

No distractions, no comparisons, just one work, given the space the work deserves.


Archive

February 2026

William Farr
Attachment 9
Oil on canvas
90 x 90 cm
2025

About the artwork


William Farr’s paintings do not simply sit in a room, they press back. Large canvases lean rather than hang, held in a state of tension, and some carry speakers that emit sub audible frequencies. You do not hear them, but you feel them, a low hum in the body that turns painting into presence.

The work is built around contradiction. Farr asks why make objects at all in a world that teaches detachment, why insist on permanence when everything urges release. He does not resolve this. He inhabits it, using painting as a way to stay with pain, grief, and the fragile construction of self without turning them into narrative or comfort.

A key shift appears in the arrival of white, a colour he once avoided. Layered and mixed for transparency, it becomes a threshold between holding and letting go, capturing time while suggesting disappearance. The title expands this tension further. Attachment is fastening and bond, constraint and devotion, technical and tender.

Rather than offering an image to decode, the paintings operate as an experience of sustained attention. Surfaces pulse between control and collapse, intimacy and distance, as if meaning is constantly forming and unforming in real time. In this sense, Attachment resists quick consumption and definitive interpretation, asking instead for proximity, endurance, and the willingness to remain with what cannot be neatly released.


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The artist


William Farr (b. 1992) is a British painter based in London. He received his MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art (2024). His recent solo exhibitions include Metanoia at Berntson Bhattacharjee, London (2025), and Attachment, curated by Rubedo at Palazzo Cramer, Milan (2025). In March 2026, Farr will present an eight-week solo exhibition, Dissolution, at Homecoming Gallery, Amsterdam.

Farr’s practice unfolds as a sustained investigation into states of inward attention and transformation. Metanoia, a term denoting radical change of mind or orientation marked a turning point in his work, articulating painting as a site of reversal: a movement away from assertion, image, or narrative toward attentiveness, restraint, and suspension. The paintings emerged through a disciplined process of layering and erasure, in which intention is gradually loosened and perception allowed to reorganise itself.

Dissolution extends this inquiry by confronting what remains once that turning has occurred. Here, dissolution is not understood as negation or destruction, but as the slow unbinding of fixed structures of self, habit, and authorship. Working in oil on linen, Farr constructs surfaces that resist immediacy, unfolding through subtle shifts of tone, translucency, and depth. Colour is treated less as expression than as condition something to be entered rather than read.

Drawing on the Romantic sublime and the legacy of Colour Field painting, Farr describes his work as the pursuit of an ‘empty place’: a threshold state in which control and surrender, discipline and intuition, coexist. While grounded in lived experience, his paintings aim toward a collective contemplative space one in which looking becomes a temporal, reflective act, and meaning arises through sustained attention rather than declaration.