• Gretel Warner: A Body Made of Echoes

    Gretel Warner: A Body Made of Echoes

    Gretel Warner’s practice unfolds through bodies that shift between clarity and dissolution. Her figures hold memory, instinct and contradiction, revealing emotional states that emerge before language. This Viewing Room offers an intimate entry into her world, moving from the studio to the paintings that shape her visual vocabulary.

     

    Her figures carry the impressions of lived experience, revealing what the body remembers long before thought turns it into meaning. 

    Gretel Warner’s work is rooted in the physical and emotional elasticity of the human figure. Her paintings do not aim to define the body but to follow its transitions: moments of closeness, tension, humour, exhaustion and desire. The figures appear layered, sometimes unresolved, shifting between presence and outline as if caught in the act of becoming. This sense of transformation sits at the heart of her practice. Warner builds her surfaces through oil, acrylic and charcoal, letting the materials collide, stain and accumulate. Each mark remains visible, contributing to a tactile immediacy that mirrors the fluidity of emotional experience. Rather than pursuing harmony or idealisation, she embraces distortion as a form of truth. A body may stretch, collapse, multiply or merge with the surrounding space. These shifts reflect how inner states rarely remain still, how thought and feeling coexist in perpetual motion. Her studio plays an essential role in this process. It is a place where works gather like presences, where canvases lean against one another, forming a kind of emotional architecture. Colours, textures and unfinished gestures inhabit the space simultaneously, influencing each other. Warner paints within this environment of friction and intuition, responding to the physicality of the materials and to the atmosphere they create around her. The works presented in this Viewing Room reveal the range of her language. “The Three Graces (With A Little Less Grace)” reimagines a classical motif through the raw, unfiltered dynamics of female friendship, restoring agency and complexity to the trio. “On Her Throne” offers a moment of unapologetic presence, where the figure claims space through a mixture of strength and vulnerability. “They Said ‘Life Is a Bed of Roses’ (They Lied)” transforms the bedroom into an emotional landscape, revealing the intensity and honesty that emerge behind closed doors. Taken together, these works highlight Warner’s ability to merge narrative, gesture and psychological depth. Her paintings do not provide answers. They invite recognition. They speak to the contradictions inherent in being human and to the quiet, persistent echoes that shape our internal lives.
  • Gretel Warner in Her Studio
     

    Gretel Warner in Her Studio

    Gretel Warner is a British artist based in Essex whose work explores the fluid, contradictory nature of emotion through a highly instinctive approach to figurative painting. Using oil, acrylic and charcoal, she builds layered surfaces where bodies appear distorted, vulnerable and in transformation. Her practice draws from personal notes, memory fragments and everyday experiences, creating paintings that hold space for imperfection and emotional honesty.
  • Works in Transition Canvases resting on the floor reveal the fluid rhythm of Warner’s process. Figures shift in scale, colour...
    Works finished and in progress arranged across the studio floor.
    Works in Transition
    Canvases resting on the floor reveal the fluid rhythm of Warner’s process. Figures shift in scale, colour and tone, echoing one another across the space. This moment inside the studio captures the raw, transitional stage where ideas move freely before settling into their final form.
     
    The Three Graces (With A Little Less Grace)
    Warner reimagines the classical Graces through a contemporary lens. The trio occupies space with humour, tension and unapologetic presence. Their merging gestures reflect the closeness, contradictions and shared emotional landscape of real friendship. Rather than idealisation, the work offers a portrait of authenticity and freedom.
     
    On Her Throne
    The figure sits in a moment of quiet self-possession. Surrounded by vivid colour and movement, she claims the space with a blend of strength and vulnerability. Warner focuses on the emotional weight carried by the body, turning the scene into a reflection on identity, confidence and inner grounding
     
    They Said ‘Life Is a Bed of Roses’ (They Lied)
    The bedroom becomes an emotional landscape where the same woman appears in shifting states. Layered textures and vivid colours trace moments of rest, tension and introspection. The work embraces honesty over idealisation, revealing the raw complexity of inner life when no façade is required.