In Motion – between abstraction and figuration

BEST OF | Issue 04 | AUTUMN/WINTER 2025/26

Last summer, within the sleek confines of the Drivers & Business Club Germany in MunicH, Paris Brosnan unveiled In Motion – his first major European exhibition and the formal launch of a long-term collaboration between Pantheon Art and Marcus Schaefer, art advisor and curator, framed by a city that balances engineering precision with cultural sophistication, the show marked the intersection of instinct, structure and velocity – a study in rhythm translated to canvas.

At just twenty-four, Paris Brosnan has already developed a visual language grounded in cadence. His paintings emerge through process rather than plan – fields of vivid colour and spontaneous lines where intuition becomes form. “I let the colours, the movement, and the rhythm of the moment dictate where the work goes,” he explains. The result is an aesthetic that straddles abstraction and figuration, echoing both the improvisational pulse of music and the gestural expressiveness of post-war painting.

Paris Brosnan, Hierarchies of Existance, 2023

Instinctive. Unfiltered. Contemporary.

The In Motion series extends this dialogue between sound and sight. Within the layered compositions, silhouettes surface and dissolve; pigment behaves like percussion. There is an elasticity to his mark-making that recalls De Kooning’s tension or the calligraphic motion of Cy Twombly, but without imitation. Brosnan’s works carry the texture of youth and movement.

Curated in partnership between Pantheon Art and Marcus Schaefer, the Munich presentation was more than a debut – it was a deliberate act of cultural positioning. Pantheon, the London- and Los Angeles-based studio known for bridging art and entertainment worlds, approached the exhibition as both aesthetic and infrastructural statement: a signal that Brosnan’s practice is to be encountered seriously, not as an extension of celebrity, but as an evolution of craft. “Munich was chosen for its balance of history and innovation,” notes Schaefer. “There’s a collector base here that understands motion – the relationship between discipline and expression.” It was a fitting backdrop. The DRIVERS & BUSINESS CLUB GERMANY, typically a space of luxury machines and industrial design, offered a conceptual mirror to Brosnan’s paintings. Each canvas vibrated within the architecture, an echo of engines translated into pigment.

Paris Brosnan, Cosmic Twins, 2023

Unexpected highlight

That dialogue between art and engineering reached a literal crescendo when BMW Classic – long a patron of design heritage – staged an unannounced intervention: three original James Bond cars were rolled into the courtyard midway through the evening. The gesture, though unexpected, deepened the night’s theme. Precision met instinct; velocity met stillness. Guests drifted between vehicles and canvases, the boundaries between spectacle and reflection blurring.

For Brosnan, In Motion reflected an inward response to the velocity of contemporary life – “a way of processing the noise,” he noted, “of finding a kind of meditative tempo in the act of making.” That search for tempo connects Brosnan’s work to a wider generational current within contemporary painting. In an age defined by overstimulation, young artists are reclaiming gesture as a form of resistance – a return to the body, to intuition, to the mark as evidence of presence. Brosnan’s contribution is particularly interesting in this context: his fluency across visual and cultural languages allows him to bridge scenes and audiences rarely aligned.

Paris Brosnan, Tunnels, 2022

Come to stay

If In Motion – Munich suggested arrival, it also proposed continuity. The works themselves resist completion; they hover between expression and reflection, between gesture and erasure. Their rhythm lies not in their colour alone, but in the space they occupy – a visual tempo that recalls the pulse of a city in motion. At the DRIVERS & BUSINESS CLUB GERMANY, as the night drew to a close and guests moved between the Bond cars and the final canvases, there was a collective awareness of having witnessed a shift – not simply a debut, but a reframing. Paris Brosnan’s rhythm had entered the room, and from that point on, it refused to leave.

Izzy Macdonald, Marcus Schaefer and Paris Brosnan at “The Charles” Munich