Art exhibition by Philip Briel

Palazzo de Piro in Mdina is currently hosting an art exhibition by South African artist Philip Briel. The exhibition is open to the public Monday to Sunday until 31 May.

Philip was raised on a sugar farm in a remote area of Northern KwaZulu Natal and graduated in architecture from the University of Cape Town. He holds an M.Sc. in Sustainable Urban Development from the University of Oxford. Philip divides his time between painting and his architectural practice in Cape Town.

His abstract mixed media canvasses are inspired by his love for environment, both natural and man built, and he enjoys the cross between the discipline of architectural design and the freedom of modern painting.

His works are full of intense shades, fractured or spilling light and charged textures. Artist Philip Briel sets out to capture the episodic and fragmentary, the subtler energies driving nature.

You think about windswept beaches, tidal estuaries and phoenix fynbos: in short, freedom. The work is suggestive with an elusive quality: attention to nuance is what Briel is all about.

His abstract mixed media canvases are inspired by a fierce sense of place. “I’m not into iconic mentors. I started out in architecture, a disciplined and exacting profession in which you have to learn to visualise dimensions and do an enormous number of calculations.”

“Art opened me up to different possibilities. Now I look at planes and elevations as if they are the surface of a canvas, shifting and fluid, not fixed. As in the art, my design work now is all about freedom, mobility and uncluttered spaces.”

“Sometimes I work on a canvas just erasing and editing down. The alchemy of the moment is decisive.”

Entrance to the exhibition is free of charge.