Maurice Nugent and Sean McLusky come together for Construction of Distance, a new exhibition at 2&4 Vintage in London exploring how colour, form and space shape the way we look at the world around us.
Running from 16th–24th October, the exhibition brings together Nugent’s new 360 reliefs with paintings by McLusky, setting two different approaches to abstraction and construction against the furniture, objects and domestic environment of 2&4 Vintage.
The exhibition begins with a deceptively simple question: why are things organised and arranged the way they are?
For Nugent, that question sits naturally between art and design.
Trained in furniture and product design at the Royal College of Art, he worked across product development, furniture and model-making before establishing his own design practice in the 1990s. He later founded 2&4 Vintage in 2008, specialising in the restoration and reuse of mid-century furniture and lighting. CONSTRUCTION OF DISTANCE PR (1)
His new 360 reliefs bring that design history directly into the work.
Made from MDF, spray paint and lacquer, the circular compositions use bold blocks of colour, stripes and geometric forms that echo modernist interiors and the graphic language of 1980s music packaging.
They have the precision of designed objects, but colour does much of the emotional work. Circles appear contained, interrupted or pushed against one another, creating a visual rhythm that shifts as the eye moves across the surface.
Sean McLusky approaches space from another direction.
With a background spanning fine art, music, club culture and gallery-making, McLusky has spent decades moving between creative worlds. He was involved with venues including The Brain, Club UK and Scala, later establishing NEU Gallery, GALLERY46 and FARSIGHT GALLERY.
His work has similarly moved between installation, conceptual practice, faux history and painting, often circling ideas of nostalgia, banality and mystery.
The earlier Construction paintings are especially pared back: raw plywood is interrupted by flat areas of grey paint, creating simple architectural shapes that feel almost like sections of walls, rooms or plans stripped down to their basic geometry.
Alongside them are looser paintings from 2022 in which those hard edges give way to broader fields of colour.
Dark blues, greys, greens, oranges and pale pinks overlap and push into one another, creating compositions that feel less designed than accumulated — as though space is being built and dismantled simultaneously.
Placed together, Nugent and McLusky’s work reveals two very different kinds of construction.
One begins with precision, surface and the visual logic of design. The other moves between structure and instinct, allowing shape and colour to become increasingly uncertain.
That contrast feels particularly at home inside 2&4 Vintage, where artworks sit alongside furniture and objects already carrying the visual languages of modernism and domestic design.
Rather than treating art, furniture and interiors as separate things, Construction of Distance allows them to occupy the same space — and asks us to think again about why one object sits beside another in the first place.
Maurice Nugent & Sean McLusky, Construction of Distance, 16th–24th October 2026,
2&4 Vintage
Art Opening Friday 16th October – 6PM – Late
