In their solo exhibition, Love Songs for Desperados, the British artist duo John Wood (b. 1969) and Paul Harrison (b. 1966) present a series of new oil paintings that continue this open-ended, self-referential practice. Central to the exhibition is Some Painted Books (2025), their largest painting to date—24 panels featuring 690 hand-painted book spines. Other painted works, mostly single-panel bookshelves, are standalone chapters on themes such as studies on color palettes, incremental degrees, or cardinal directions on a compass. This series of A painting about ... (all 2025) is no different in this regard. Each painting feels both finished and incomplete, offering invitations rather than conclusions, leaving room for projection and reflection.

Next to paintings, several *furniture sculptures *extend this logic into the third dimension. Simple configurations such as a school desk and chair obsessively colored in with a ballpoint pen, a wooden cloths dryer, or a coffee table with an apparently causally deposited book become vessels for imagined stories. 

Neons, a longtime element of their work, serve a different role here. Direct and self-aware, these luminous phrases, Words on the Front of a Building (2023), ON/OFF (2023), or Wall (2021), act like labels made manifest. Monumental in scale and shamelessly obvious, they don’t suggest but declare. 

Love Songs for Desperados offers an inward journey, where melancholy meets humour, and clarity coexists with ambiguity. It’s a snapshot of where Wood & Harrison are today—and an open book for anyone, regardless of how they may feel, to read themselves into.

John Wood and Paul Harrison live and work in Bristol, UK. Their works are exhibited internationally, such as recently at Kunsthalle Goppingen, DE; Pakistan National Council of the Arts, Islamabad; and Fundação Leal Rios, Lisbon. They are also part of private, institutional, and corporate collections such as Albertina Museum, Vienna; Tate, London; Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA; and Museo de Antioquia, Medellin, CO.

Header image: Exhibition view, John Wood & Paul Harrison, Love Songs for Desperados, von Bartha, Basel, 2025