Joe Eccles and his Existential Abstraction

Joe Eccles (b.1987) is a contemporary abstract painter based in Bromsgrove whose work explores endurance, emotional weight, and the tension between structure and surrender. Alongside his artistic practice, Eccles works within the analytical world of actuarial science and investments — an environment shaped by logic, probability, and measured outcomes. Painting functions as a necessary counterpoint: a space led less by solution and certainty, and more by intuition, atmosphere, and lived emotional experience.

Working primarily in large-scale abstraction, Eccles builds his paintings through repeated layering, removal, obscuring, and reconstruction. Forms emerge and collapse back into the surface, creating compositions that feel simultaneously unstable and held together. His process is slow and accumulative, often unfolding across months, allowing each painting to absorb time, revision, resistance, and emotional change.

Eccles believes his dyslexic way of seeing contributes to a heightened sensitivity toward spatial relationships, rhythm, and visual tension. While his professional life depends upon precision and control, his paintings deliberately move toward ambiguity and openness. Rather than resolving complexity, the work attempts to remain inside it.

Recent paintings have shifted away from the brighter energy of earlier works toward darker, more atmospheric surfaces where luminosity appears through density rather than decoration. These paintings explore the experience of carrying what we did not choose to carry: grief, responsibility, uncertainty, mortality, love, and the quiet endurance required to continue holding them.

For Eccles, abstraction is not escape from reality, but a way of staying with it.

Selected Exhibitions & Commissions:

Selfridges Birmingham (Mural Commission 2024)

RBSA Gallery (Royal Birmingham Society of Artists)

The Herbert Art Gallery & Museum

Upcoming Solo Show: Learning to Hold - 2027