Laurie Smith’s ‘Brick Boys’ – Movement, Desire and the City Reimagined

Gathering Cologne plays host this winter to Brick Boys, the European debut solo exhibition by British artist Laurie Smith, a painter whose work pulses with life, longing and restless energy. On view from 5 November to 20 December 2025, Smith’s canvases invite viewers into a world where movement never quite settles, and the city itself becomes both stage and story.

Smith’s figures are caught mid-motion, their limbs twisting and reaching as if propelled by invisible forces. There is something almost theatrical in their gestures – echoes of Balthus’s enigmatic characters – yet Smith’s subjects are no puppets. They act on impulse, driven by thrill and emotion, charging through urban landscapes that feel both familiar and dreamlike.

Set against the pavements of London, these new works capture moments that exist between places and feelings. Lovers and friends drift through the night, framed by the texture of bricks and the rhythm of streetlight. Smith’s fascination with the city’s architecture draws clear influence from Martin Wong, whose paintings chronicled New York’s changing neighbourhoods and the beauty of marginalised communities. But while Wong’s city looked upward at its towers, Smith’s gazes outward, finding poetry in the grit of the street.

A recurring theme in Smith’s work is queer nightlife, though Brick Boys moves the narrative beyond the clubs and ballrooms of earlier paintings. Here, the city itself becomes the dancefloor. London’s streets transform into spaces of transition – neither public nor private, safe nor exposed – where joy and vulnerability collide.

The exhibition’s largest canvas pays homage to Balthus’s The Street (1933), reimagined through a distinctly contemporary lens. Nine figures appear lost in their own dramas, each consumed by motion, desire or distraction, yet bound within a shared moment of urban choreography. The composition flirts with chaos but never loses control, echoing the tension between isolation and connection that defines modern city life.

Giorgio de Chirico’s influence also lingers in the air, with Smith adopting the painter’s sense of metaphysical unease – those strange, elongated spaces that feel suspended in time. Yet here, the mood is less foreboding than expectant, as if every shadowed corner might contain the promise of something new.

Cinematic references ripple through the work, particularly to the queer films and literature of the 1980s and 1990s that captured the tension between visibility and secrecy, grief and freedom. Smith’s paintings breathe in that same atmosphere – of nights that blur between melancholy and euphoria, and of cities that remember every step their inhabitants have taken.

In Brick Boys, Laurie Smith brings together the threads of modern art, film and literature to craft a vision of London that is alive, aching and hopeful. His city is one of transformation, where ghosts of the past walk beside the pulse of the present, and where every street glows with the possibility of reinvention.

For those who walk through Brick Boys, the journey is not just through Smith’s painted streets – it is through the layered emotions of a generation still learning how to move, love and exist freely within the urban sprawl.