‘There’s a meadow next to where I live – I walk through it on the way to the studio and do a lot of thinking there’
Billy Crosby, 2025
Union Gallery is delighted to present The Meadow, Billy Crosby’s first major solo show in London to date. The exhibition presents a brand-new series of paintings from the artist’s studio in south-east London.
The singular work of Billy Crosby intuitively connects the complex relation of painting to current global discourse around the subject of machine learning and its impact on socio-political and personal futures. Crosby guides us into this novel landscape by adopting ‘new tech’ as a natural partner in paint, quieting the hysteria surrounding AI and its potential consequences. Instead, Crosby offers a deeper painterly means to probe these concepts at the dawn of their realisation.
‘The Meadow signifies a gentle, liminal place of emergence; of rest and threshold, wildness
and openness. It implies a context of entangled life, diverse intelligences and larger patterns.’
BC
The eponymous meadow can be understood then, as a literal setting as well as an inner or psychic terrain. Both ancient and modern, The Meadow operates on a suspended plane of speculative contemplation. Here we encounter the fruits of Crosby’s lived experience filtered through a recursive dialogue with generative AIs and LoRA diffusion models, trained on the artist’s previous work.
‘Motifs of biological mimicry and artificial emergence run throughout the work. Forms suggestive of mycelium, neural net structures and symbolic architectures flicker in and out of legibility…’
BC
The formal configuration of his painting often involves the recurring figurehead of a guide-like chaperone, part mystic, part automaton. Though not a central subject, the recurring presence of this talismanic animation leads us through Crosby’s labyrinthine imagery, and hints at sentience within the complex lexicon of his visual language.
Collectively, this body of work represents a pertinent commemoration of the current moment as digital advances reshape the eternal record once again. We meet Crosby in this rarefied prairie of interconnected existence, this neutral and neural pasture, to experience afresh the senescence of living and snatch a glimpse of contemporaneity as it stands at the cultural crossroads of today.
Curated by Shane Bradford, 2025