Current
23.1 – 28.2 2026
Catherine Long:After The Fire
3–5 Swallow Street
Catherine Long:After The Fire
23.1 – 28.2.2026
Current
Hours
Monday to Friday, 10:00am – 5:30pm
Saturday, 1:30pm – 5:30pm
Gallery
3–5 Swallow Street
London
W1B 4DE
Catherine Long. Still Waters (2025)
Huxley-Parlour is pleased to present After the Fire, an exhibition of new work by London-based artist Catherine Long (b. 1982). This exhibition marks Long’s first solo show in London and her first with Huxley-Parlour. Long’s paintings propose abstraction as an embodied encounter, an experience that precedes language and registers first as bodily sensation.
Working across multiple canvases simultaneously, Long builds compositions through successive sessions of improvisation and return. Rooted in the artist’s formative training in contemporary dance and ongoing somatic practice, these works treat the canvas as a choreographic field: a site activated through rhythm, gravity, and the body’s intuitive intelligence. Marks are laid down with the urgency of gesture, mobilising the artist’s full body in relation to the canvas as an arena of space. These marks are then revised through layering, drying, observation and renewal, allowing the paintings to accumulate as records of both movement and time, of decisions made and remade.
Register your interestHighlights
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Long’s paintings are organised by accumulation, unfolding against the possibility of erasure. She employs oil bar alongside thick painted contours to generate raised lines that are then overpainted. These drawn marks persist as residual traces, and function as a kind of internal armature – structural, sinuous, and load-bearing – around which subsequent layers accumulate. This structural persistence suggests painting as a form of memory: histories held within the surface, simultaneously concealed and present.
Long situates her practice within a broader history of painters who have described the canvas as a sensory instrument, capable of transmitting affect directly and bypassing narrative explanation. She emphasises the continuing capacity of abstraction to communicate without prescription through what she describes as kinesthetic empathy: a physiological resonance in which looking becomes a felt experience.
The Exhibition
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The Works
17
Catherine Long
Falling Into Dust
2025
Oil on linen
Catherine Long
Amidst The Burning Breeze
2025
Oil and oil bar on linen
Catherine Long
Unruly Sun
2025
Oil on linen
Catherine Long
This Skin I’m In
2025
Oil and oil bar on linen
Catherine Long
In The Wake
2025
Oil on linen
Catherine Long
Constellation of Tomorrow
2025
Oil on linen
Catherine Long
Mountain High
2025
Oil on linen
Catherine Long
Devotion
2025
Oil and oil bar on linen
Catherine Long
Origin of Being
2025
Oil and oil bar on linen
Catherine Long
Still Waters
2025
Oil on linen
Catherine Long
Elegy For The Night
2025
Oil on linen
Catherine Long
Inscription I
2025
Oil on wooden panel
Catherine Long
Inscription II
2025
Oil on wooden panel
Catherine Long
Etchings of Another Time I
2025
Oil on wooden panel
Catherine Long
Etchings of Another Time II
2025
Oil on wooden panel
Catherine Long
Etchings of Another Time III
2025
Oil on wooden panel
Catherine Long
Etchings of Another Time IV
2025
Oil on wooden panel
Catherine Long
B. United Kingdom 1982
B. United Kingdom 1982
Biography
Catherine Long’s painting practice is grounded in a background in contemporary dance, where somatic awareness, spatial intelligence, and improvisation formed the basis of her formal training. Rather than approaching painting as a departure from movement, Long treats the canvas as a choreographic field: an arena activated through the body, rhythm, and gesture. Her work draws on a sustained engagement with postwar experimental practices across dance, music, and visual art, where process and embodied perception take precedence over representation.
Working primarily at scale, Long builds her paintings through accumulation, and organises the surface through sinuous contours and layered marks that persist across time. The resulting compositions resist narrative resolution, instead inviting a direct, physiological encounter – one in which sensation precedes interpretation and viewing becomes an embodied experience.
Long holds an MA in Dance from De Montfort University (2010) and a PhD in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Arts (2017). She completed an MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art in 2024. Her work has been supported by residencies in the United Kingdom and Portugal, and she is a recipient of funding from Arts Council England. In 2025, Long presented a series of large-scale paintings at Lucent W1, London, in collaboration with Wilder Gallery, and participated in group exhibitions including LBF@TheLake II at LBF Contemporary, Muskoka, and Sight Lines at Hurst Contemporary, London. Long lives and works in London.
Image credit: brave Projects, Sarah Larby