Christopher Le Brun is returning to Lisson Gallery in London this November with a new body of paintings that brings landscape, light and the night sky back to the centre of his work. The Mind's Weather opens at the gallery's Lisson Street space on 19 November and runs to 13 February 2027, marking a marked turn toward recognisable imagery after two decades in which abstraction dominated his painting.

Suns, moons and planetary forms recur across the new canvases, glowing inside broad fields of colour that never quite settle into description. In Quarry and Press (Sun Notes IV), both painted this year, solar discs hover over dispersed pigment; The Chalk Pit reimagines the South Downs as a fractured, spreading terrain, while Pastoral (Numbered Landscape I) sets twin light sources above a low horizon. Other works, such as Act and the Field Poem series, let darker marks suggest solid ground before dissolving it into brighter colour, so that earth and air trade places.

The shift reaches back to the mythic, narrative painting Le Brun made in the 1970s and 1980s, before his work moved toward abstraction — but the figuration here stays elusive, closer to atmosphere than to place. The artist has described painting as physical yet metaphysical in feeling, its presence suggesting somewhere that is not here, and the new works carry that idea: each picture works as much as an evocation of an inner state as a response to the visible world. The show is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with an essay by Barry Phipps.

Le Brun, born in Portsmouth in 1951, was president of the Royal Academy of Arts from 2011 to 2019 and was knighted for services to the arts. His work is held by Tate, the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the British Museum, among others. The Mind's Weather is his latest solo presentation with Lisson, where he has shown for many years.