Ross + Kramer is pleased to present “All around the Wrekin’”, a solo exhibition of new work by London-based artist, David Brian Smith. Smith is known for his luminous landscapes that weave together memory, imagination, and ancestral heritage. Rooted in the English pastoral tradition yet boldly contemporary in vision, Smith’s paintings explore ideas of place, belonging, and time through radiant color, intricate brushwork, and layered symbolism.
Having grown up in the rural countryside of Shropshire, Smith’s early connection to agrarian life deeply informs his practice. After relocating to London to study at the Chelsea College of Art and Design, he began using landscape painting as a means to reconnect with his family’s history and to reimagine his relationship to the land. The exhibition's title, “All around the Wrekin’”, takes its name from a classic Midlands expression, meaning “to take the long way around”.
Smith’s large-scale canvases—painted on heavily woven herringbone linen in a nod to his family’s heritage—evoke the spirit of Norwich School painters, yet are re-envisioned through a hallucinatory, technicolor lens. The artist’s compositions are rich with narrative and detail: tiny figures on horseback traverse fields, multicolored animals graze beneath iridescent skies, and miniature farmhouses rest among rolling hills. These scenes hover between reality and reverie, merging personal memory with myth and folklore. Smith’s use of transparent and opaque layers of oil paint, often combined with gold and silver leaf, give his surfaces an ethereal luminosity, transforming the familiar English countryside into something at once nostalgic and transcendent.
David Brian Smith (b. 1981 in Wolverhampton, England) focuses his creative efforts on landscape painting, using it as a means to reconnect with his family’s history. Smith grew up in the countryside of Shropshire and later moved to London, which ignited his desire to return to rural life after a period of work and city living. Smith uses his practice to reimagine his past and contemplate his future place.
Smith studied at Shrewsbury College of Art, Wolverhampton University and Chelsea College of Art and Design, London. His works have been featured in both solo and group shows in galleries and institutions such as Telegraph Foundation, Olomouc; Galerie ISA, Mumbai; Asia Art Center, Taipei; Althuis Hofland, Amsterdam; Juming Museum, Taiwan; Albert Baronian Gallery, Brussels; Carl Freedman Gallery, London; Galerie VidalCuglietta, Brussels; Saatchi Gallery, London; F2T Gallery, Milan; MplusM Gallery, Hong Kong.
David Brian Smith received the Creekside Open Award in 2013 and the Royal Academy Landscape Painting Award in 2005. Smith lives and works in London.
“All around the Wrekin” will be on view at Ross + Kramer Miami Beach October 23–November 22, 2025. The gallery is located at 1910 Alton Road, Miami Beach, FL. For more information or images, please contact info@rkgallery.com.