YveYANG is pleased to return to Liste Basel with a solo presentation featuring William Feaver.

My paintings refer to settings, sometimes arrived at fortuitously – mountainous, submerged, flooded, wild, or managed over aeons. Over the years, the paintings build up through repeated attention and a devotion to particular landscapes.

Landscapes are also accounts of depth and height, of the events caused by weather, and also by spoliation. Hence my obsession with landforms and seasonal prospects, especially in the High Pennines of Northumberland, where the conditions can change the character of the land in an instant, or cumulatively.

I carry a sketchbook wherever I go, and draw constantly. It’s a matter of observation and being alive to the perpetual changes that light, atmospheric pressures and times of year bring. Ordnance Survey Maps are a great resource – every tiny detail, whether cairn, sheepfold, hedgerow or former mine-working meticulously noted. Like maps, the paintings bring out the sense of a landscape’s unique history and geology, of the people that have lived and worked on it, and the forces that have shaped it, whether or not that’s visible on the surface. Paintings absorb these changes; they offer possibilities for change, renewal, and surprise.

—William Feaver, August 2025

William Feaver is a British artist whose engagement with landscape spans over six decades of visual and intellectual inquiry.

He primarily paints in the North Pennines, England’s last wilderness, observing over long periods and revisiting at intervals. Moving between the stark luminosity of winter snowfields and the dense tonal complexities of summer foliage, he involves the rhythms of the natural world in images that verge on abstraction. He works with oil on board out in the elements, as well as in the studio, with brushstrokes swerving spontaneously across the surface; paint can be intensely reworked, condensed, and scraped. Chromatic and spatial contrasts unfold as he returns repeatedly to certain places – not only Northumberland, but also Scotland, France and Italy – incorporating the transformations of time and human traces.

Feaver occupies a singular position within contemporary British culture. An early advocate of the School of London, he is a central figure in postwar art discourse, whose critical writings continue to shape the understanding of artists such as Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach. His lifelong painting practice reveals a parallel commitment to sustained observation and the material intelligence of painting itself.