William Austin is pleased to present Either/Or, an exhibition of new paintings by London-based artist Ursula Bradley. Moving between scenes of adolescent fantasy, adult aspiration and the strange architecture of everyday life, Bradley’s paintings take a wry look at how we come to desire the very things and structures we once resisted.

Previously based in Paris and now living in London, in this body of work, Bradley takes up her own itinerance as a condition through which to muse upon ideals of social and material progress—how the fantasy of being different coexists with, and is gradually reshaped by, the desire for convention. For the artist, what was once an imposed burden becomes more plausible, until the expectations of adulthood slowly begin to feel like our own. In one painting, a wedding-cake topper bride drags her groom towards a love store, yet its archaic caricature of heterosexual marriage retains an aspirational familiarity. Elsewhere, teenagers inhabit the imaginative freedoms of youth, antagonistic to the models of adulthood set before them. A scene drawn from the British television series Skins recalls a moment when other ways of being still seem possible, as two figures conspiratorially evoke a different kind of escape: the outsider’s promise of illicit freedom, but not without its attendant exclusion and material precarity.

Bradley approaches these shifting desires via her fascination with mice, rats and other urban vermin, often presenting her surreal, composite cityscapes from a rodent’s-eye view. Figures and structures loom overhead, while small, previously unseen spaces open up at ground level. This low perspective is both a compositional device and a way of situating the outsider within the social world. The mice that might inhabit the paintings’ walls and crevices are not marginal figures; they are resourceful occupants of a city whose structures were not necessarily built for them. Their search for somewhere to settle echoes the individual’s search for a place within the vast, often indifferent environments of urban life.

Across the exhibition, the city appears as a “fun hell”: a place of absurdity and constraint, but also possibility. Beneath a scaffold, a space of one’s own waits; an escalator offers up the promise of effortless upward movement. This is a society still under construction and there may yet be room to slot oneself in somewhere. Bradley’s paintings hold the desire to belong alongside the impulse to remain apart, finding freedom in the spaces between.