Municipal Bonds is pleased to present Passing, the first U.S. solo exhibition by British artist Felix Butterwick, on view in the gallery's Annex from November 7 through December 23, 2026. Butterwick's paintings investigate the social and psychological dimensions of lived spaces. Working from personal recollection and imagery, both his own and found, he moves between fragments of the human figure and familiar surroundings. His compositions inhabit an ambiguous territory between recognition and abstraction, where the intimacy of a subject coexists with its anonymity.
In Butterwick's often strikingly spare paintings, a window or the outline of a roof may be sufficient to establish a setting, while a chair evokes an unseen occupant. Elsewhere, a figure lies in bed, or a face appears only in part. Architectural details and human forms, at times reduced to a few decisive lines, emerge against broad expanses of color. Isolated from a fuller narrative, these moments acquire a gravity that belies their everyday appearance.
The garden shed at Butterwick's family home in Nottingham, England, recurs in Untitled (Shed III, IV, and V), each painted from memory. He relates the structure to André Breton's notion of living in a glass house, an imagined domestic environment in which private life is exposed to the outside world. The comparison gives the modest backyard building an unexpected charge. As a place of shelter, the shed offers a degree of separation from the world, yet its imagined transparency makes that separation precarious. Through successive paintings, he returns to an image whose significance is bound to the experience of having occupied the place, even as its representation becomes increasingly independent of the original structure.
His engagement with figuration extends to the psychological possibilities of the human subject. In Untitled, the arrangement of a figure suggests an encounter without disclosing its circumstances. In Bunk, a head develops through mark-making, its appearance shaped by the properties of the medium. The physical dimensions of the canvas also inform his practice. In smaller works such as Trained Facing, the compressed surface gives each mark particular consequence. He prepares his supports over several days with gesso and rabbit-skin glue before painting in oil, often working with an immediacy that contrasts with the deliberation of their preparation.
Images circulate through Butterwick's studio, with one source set aside as another is taken up, sometimes returning to an earlier subject. This fluid approach to composition allows the original imagery to acquire a character increasingly independent of its source, as the possibilities of painting guide its development. The title Passing derives from his awareness of images moving through his imagination and studio, remaining in his company for a time before eventually leaving his possession. Made during a period of personal loss, these paintings carry a heightened awareness of time and the changing significance of experience. Their departure becomes another part of their history, as the works enter lives beyond the artist's own.
Felix Butterwick is an artist from Nottingham, England, based in London. Working primarily through drawing, he uses it as a discursive tool, bringing together paint, graphite, and a range of other media to explore and interrogate personal and collective histories. His work plays with the fluidity of time, reflecting on the ways memory can be constructed, altered, and distorted, and how these shifting narratives shape our understanding of the past.
He graduated from the Glasgow School of Art, Scotland, in 2023 with a BA (Hons). Since graduating, he has exhibited nationally within the UK, showing with galleries and artist-led spaces including Incubator and Shipping Brow.
