Image: Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh
Ingleby Gallery has announced the next artist in its 'INSTALMENTS' series: Chilean painter Sebastián Espejo. The exhibition, titled 'INSTALMENTS | Sebastián Espejo', is scheduled for 13 August to 12 September 2026 and coincides with the 2026 Edinburgh Art Festival. Ingleby says the show will be presented in the gallery’s 'Feast Room', with an online version also available, including a film of the artist in his studio.
The gallery’s presentation brings together a range of Espejo’s works that explore what the gallery describes as “worlds within worlds.” Across the exhibition materials, Espejo’s paintings are framed as reflections on infinity and interiority, using humble objects and symbolic landscapes to move between enclosed space and distant horizons. The online viewing room highlights several works from 2023 to 2026, including 'Estanque', 'Basket, Morning', 'Feed, Table', 'Treng Treng Vilú', 'The Palm Tree (after Palmeras, Adolfo Couve)', 'Basket, Night', 'Nubes, Amarillo', 'Two Avocados', 'Una Esfera con dos Polos', 'Si Quieres Venir', 'Temple', 'Small Changes', 'Escena con ventana', 'Genji', 'Feed', 'Yellow Nasturtium, Cygnus', 'Red Cattle', 'Una Espiral que Gira a la Izquierda', 'El Agua, El Sueño' and 'Just as My Calendar Began to Say Summer'.
Ingleby’s online text describes Espejo’s studio, currently on the edge of an industrial estate in Northeast London, as a warm and carefully inhabited space. It notes the presence of objects the artist has brought with him from different times and places, which he calls “characters in a miniature theatre of light.” The gallery presents these objects as central to his practice, saying they serve as subjects, figures and sometimes landscapes within his paintings. The studio view also situates the artist’s working environment as part of the exhibition narrative, rather than as a separate behind-the-scenes addendum.
The exhibition’s curatorial emphasis falls on Espejo’s way of constructing depth through contrast. In the gallery text, his paintings often place a still life in the foreground before opening onto a window view of a landscape, seascape or star-scape. That structure, Ingleby says, creates a philosophical tension between openness and enclosure: the viewer is offered a sense of distance and expansion while remaining held within a limited interior space. The result, according to the gallery’s framing, is a sustained dialogue between the tiny and the cosmic, the domestic and the expansive.
The viewing-room material also includes two short statements attributed to Espejo. In one, he compares colour arrangement to “flavour arrangement for a dish,” suggesting that it should have intention without always requiring a plan. In another, he says his work moves “outwards and inwards, back and forth,” and describes painting as a medium through which he tries to articulate connections between the interior and exterior, inanimate objects and the living. These remarks accompany the exhibition’s selection of paintings rather than serving as separate interview content.
Ingleby Gallery is based at 33 Barony Street in Edinburgh. Its website describes the space as a private contemporary art gallery, and lists opening hours as Wednesday to Saturday, 11am to 5pm, or by appointment. For 'INSTALMENTS | Sebastián Espejo', the gallery has also specified summer opening hours for August and September, with online access available alongside the physical exhibition from 13 August to 12 September 2026.
