Prosen | A solo exhibition by Oran Wishart

Opening Date: Tuesday 14 October 2025
Venue: Broth Art (Pop-up)
Location: 11 Caledonian Road, London N1 9DX

Broth Art is pleased to present Prosen, an exhibition of paintings, mixed media and sculpture by Scottish artist Oran Wishart. Named after Glen Prosen, a remote glen on the southern edge of the Cairngorms National Park in Scotland where Wishart grew up, Prosen is a deeply personal body of work that explores both the visible and invisible forces that shape our sense of self. Drawing on place, language and memory, Wishart moves fluidly between abstraction and figuration, allowing the two modes to coexist in a shifting, dreamlike space. His works evoke a sense of both presence and disappearance, reflecting the porous boundary between conscious experience and the subconscious world.
 
Prosen explores the interplay between place, memory and language, revealing how these elements co-create meaning and experience. Through a process of layering—whether in paint, form, or narrative—Wishart’s work suggests that our sense of self is not fixed but continuously shaped by forces both past and present, seen and unseen.

Glen Prosen serves not only as a place of origin but also as a conceptual and linguistic anchor within Wishart’s practice. For the artist, it is a landscape bound in memory—a recurring point of return and a lens through which notions of self and belonging are explored. A solitary valley traced by a single-track road, with open moorland and heather-clad hills, Glen Prosen embodies a physical and emotional remoteness that resonates deeply in Wishart's work. The name Prosen itself suggests further meaning, recalling the word “prose” and inviting reflection on the relationship between language, narrative, and place. This interplay between text and image underscores Wishart’s broader engagement with the way meaning is formed, altered, and layered through visual and verbal language.

Amongst the key works in the exhibition is a series of small, abstract paintings called A Colour Library. Each work is tied to a specific place and draws on photographs, found objects, and memory to inform colour palette and surface texture. Alongside their shared title, the paintings carry poetic subtitles – such as Lunar Caustic I and II, Cloud over Kurdistan and Harrington Street, Calcutta - evoking the atmosphere and emotion of the places they reference. Many are informed by the artist’s own writing—drawn from artists' books, diaries, and collected texts—creating a dialogue between visual form and written reflection. The works themselves are the result of a slow, intuitive process of layering, overpainting, and removal, resulting in blurred surfaces that mirror the shifting nature of memory and perception. 
 
At the centre of the exhibition space, a sculpture titled Extracted sits on a plinth. What looks like a weathered, almost geological object, is in fact a structure made entirely of oil paint fragments. Carefully removed from the surface of landscape paintings in the artist’s archive, the paint fragments are then collected and fused together using heat, creating a dense stratification of colour, texture, and history. Like sedimentary layers in a landscape, Extracted becomes a physical archive—compressing moments of gesture, memory, and place into a single, tactile object. The work speaks to Wishart’s continued exploration of transformation and return: landscapes once rendered in paint are dismantled and reconstituted as a sculptural form, mirroring the way memory fragments and reshapes lived experience. In this sense, Extracted is both an object and a trace—one that bridges the visible and invisible, and reflects on the enduring material and emotional residues of place.
 
Wishart’s mixed media series, entitled Constructed, stems from a long-running photographic project titled On the Road Architecture—a visual journal documenting buildings and architectural fragments encountered during his travels. Using shards and offcuts of found building materials, which he embeds into a base of hardened wood filler, Wishart transforms these remnants into compositions of geometric abstraction. The series is informed by his hands-on experience in building structures and furniture, as well as a longstanding interest in vernacular architecture—particularly in the context of repurposing and its reliance on materials sourced from the building’s immediate environment.

In the portrait series Gesichte—named after the German word for "faces"—Wishart turns his focus to the people who have shaped his thinking: poets, writers, artists, and strangers met over time. Each portrait is painted in watercolour at a small, intimate scale and mounted between glass with coloured frames. Identified only by first names, the figures feel familiar yet remain just out of reach. This sense of ambiguity invites the viewer in, not to pin down identities, but to reflect—on memory, recognition, and the feelings we project onto others. In this way, Gesichte continues the artist’s exploration of how our sense of self is formed—not only through places, but the emotional influence that others have on us.

Together, the works in Prosen reflect a practice grounded in the landscape, yet expansive in scope—charting an ongoing inquiry into memory, language, and the quiet material traces that places and people leave behind.

About Oran Wishart
Oran Wishart (b. 1980) lives in Biggar, Scotland. He studied Painting at Glasgow School of Art, Scotland, and Fine Art at the University of Barcelona, Spain. Wishart has exhibited work in the UK and abroad. Collaboration as well as written correspondence are influential in his wider working practice. He has completed residencies in Scotland and Iceland. His painting ‘Desert Solitaire’ was the cover artwork for Django Django’s album, 'Glowing in the Dark' in 2021 and his work is included in many private collections.

About Broth Art
Based in London, Broth Art is a nomadic gallery that represents a cross-section of emerging and mid-career artists from across the UK. Founded in 2014 by dealer and gallerist Kim Soep, it brings together emerging and mid-career artists through a programme of exhibitions presented online, at pop-ups and art fairs. 

Exhibition Details:
 Dates: 14 - 19 October 2025, 10am-6pm
 Opening Reception: Tuesday 14 October 2025, 6pm-8pm
 Location: Broth Art (Pop-up), 11 Caledonian Road, London N1 9DX
 Website: www.brothart.com
 
For media inquiries, please contact:
 kim@brothart.com

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