Paint escapes the canvas as Brendan Lyons plays with perception, material and the architecture of an extraordinary space.
A former bank vault beneath Hamilton Square in Birkenhead seems an appropriately strange place to encounter the work of Brendan Lyons. Concrete walls, concrete floors and the lingering suggestion of what the space once contained provide considerably more than a backdrop for Reel to Real, his new solo exhibition in Birkenhead. For an artist who has spent much of his practice asking us to reconsider what paint is, what it represents and, occasionally, whether we can trust what we are looking at, Hamilton Vault feels almost purpose-built.
Running from 24 October to 1 November, Reel to Real continues Lyons’ fascination with painting as both image and physical material. Recognisable objects appear within his work, but appearances can be misleading. What looks like one substance may actually be another; what initially appears familiar begins to become decidedly less so the longer we look.
At the heart of Lyons’ practice is paint itself. Rather than simply using it to create the illusion of an object upon a flat surface, he allows paint to become the object. It is a subtle but important distinction. This is not conventional trompe l’œil, where extraordinary technical skill convinces the eye that a two-dimensional image possesses depth. Lyons instead gives the painted form an existence in actual space.
For Reel to Real, that idea develops through the introduction of readymade objects including aluminium tape reels and toilet paper dispensers. Lengths of what appear to be magnetic tape and paper escape from them, travelling down walls and across the gallery floor. Except they aren’t tape or paper at all. They are paint.
It is an idea carrying a certain deadpan humour, but there is something more interesting happening beneath the visual trick. Lyons is playing with the associations we instinctively attach to objects and materials, and with that tiny moment of uncertainty when the brain attempts to reconcile what the eye thinks it sees with what is actually there.
Hamilton Vault makes that uncertainty even more effective. The former bank vault, now operating as an independent studio and exhibition space, retains an architectural severity far removed from the neutrality of the conventional white-cube gallery. Against its uniformly concrete surfaces, Lyons’ interventions have the potential to feel simultaneously alien and strangely at home.
His fascination with the possibilities of painting has already earned significant recognition. Liverpool-based Lyons has exhibited widely across the UK, with his work selected for the John Moores Painting Prize in 2020. Yet his contribution to painting in the city extends beyond his own studio.
Alongside artist Josie Jenkins, Lyons co-curated Refractive Pool: Contemporary Painting in Liverpool, a project which explored the breadth of painting being produced across the city and eventually resulted in an exhibition at the Walker Art Gallery. It was an important acknowledgement of a community of painters working in very different ways, while posing wider questions about the continuing relevance and possibilities of the medium.
Those possibilities remain central to Lyons’ own work. There is a pleasing contradiction within it: an obvious fascination with the traditions of painting coupled with an equally obvious desire to interfere with them. Paint can imitate, disguise, protrude, sag, unravel and occupy the same physical space as the person looking at it.
Which brings us back to that vault. Gallery spaces often disappear once we begin looking at the art hanging within them. Hamilton Vault is unlikely to disappear, and neither, you suspect, would Lyons want it to. Reel to Real instead promises a conversation between artwork and architecture, solidity and illusion, the object and its representation. And somewhere between a reel of tape that isn’t tape and a roll of paper that isn’t paper, Brendan Lyons asks perhaps the simplest question of all.
What, exactly, are we looking at?
Reel to Real runs at Hamilton Vault, 1 Hamilton Square, Birkenhead, from 24 October to 1 November 2026, with a preview on Friday 23 October from 6pm. The gallery is open Tuesday–Sunday, 11am–5pm.
