Hidden Boys, Open Blue

12 Nov-13 Dec 2025

Havana Crest, 2025, Oil on linen

Overview

Rooted in a formative trip to Cuba, the exhibition revisits photographs Leech took as a teenager of local boys playing in the streets of Havana. Years later, she transforms these documentary images into large-scale paintings that balance tenderness with strength, freedom with stillness. Her subjects, captured mid-motion, unguarded and unselfconscious, become meditations on a moment before social conditioning hardens expression; a fleeting state of being that is open, honest, and alive.

Rendered in oil with an unmistakable physicality, Leech’s mark-making evokes both intimacy and distance. Figures emerge and dissolve within layered blues, skies and seas merging with skin, while surface abrasions, gestural scratches, and veils of pigment recall the residue of experience. The result is an emotional topography of paint: charged, tender, and humane.

“What struck me most was how free these boys were, rolling in the dirt, laughing, unaware of how they looked. I wanted to capture that purity, that time before masculinity becomes armour.”

Extending from her previous Male Domesticity series, which examined vulnerability and labour through depictions of working men in the UK, Hidden Boys, Open Blue pairs these Cuban figures with abstracted imprints drawn from truck markings and industrial textures. This interplay of imagery, foreign yet familiar, youthful yet weathered, unites disparate geographies and generations of men under a shared condition of concealment and longing.

Leech’s chromatic shift is equally profound. Moving beyond the muted tones of her earlier works, she embraces the saturated blues of Havana’s skies and waters, offset by pastel greens and sun-worn pinks that recall mid-century façades. The palette, she notes, “opened a big door” in her practice, colour as both atmosphere and emotion, suffused withw the weight of memory and discovery.

With Hidden Boys, Open Blue, Phoebe Leech situates herself among a new generation of British painters redefining figuration through psychological and social inquiry. Her canvases hold within them the contradictions of modern manhood, its fragility, its grace, and its hidden depth.

Artists