GREG BROMLEY

First published: Spring 2025

In a Glasgow attic, Greg Bromley seeks to express quantum reality through art that is chaotic with life experience, fears, boyhood passions and a dog called Ziggy

“Welcome. You have to go through the maze to get to me”. The maze? You go east of Glasgow city centre along a dual carriageway, then through a new-build estate. You whizz past a jogger, then drive uphill to the ex-council houses. You park on the street, walk down a flagstone path, and lastly duck past a leylandii tree. If there is a cosmic maze here, it takes a special kind of a mind to see it. You would need someone like Greg Bromley to show it to you.

His terraced house is warm, tidy and welcoming. He makes a good cup of tea, and is engagingly friendly. But despite his outward calm, his art shows a startling inner world. Arranged carefully in his studio, every piece is teeming with activity – no surface left uninvaded, no line uncrossed. Multi-legged figures jostle with disembodied eyes, text and arrows. His work is an exploration of hidden realities, both psychological and quantum. Art is his escape – one that he calls a “cosmic wormhole”.

Deranged Diatribes (All Mouths and No Zero-Gravity Trousers), 2024, 18 x 12.5 in. / 46 x 32 cm

Born in 1973, Bromley grew up in the city of Hull, in northern England. His father worked in a heavy metal smelting plant, his mother was “a stay-at-home mum with side hustles,” he says. As a boy Bromley did not know any artists, but says, “I have always doodled. As a kid, I used to immerse myself in my own cosmos building. Even when I was eight, nine, ten... You create your own universe, don’t you?” Some of the themes in his current work emerged at that early age:

The Buckling Legs, and the Struggling Stars (10 Kilos Pressing Down on Your Sāwol), 2024, 17.5 x 15 in. / 45 x 38 cm

“There were a lot of sequential drawings I would do... – I wouldn’t quite call it the Bayeux tapestry but I immersed myself in my own world. There was certainly a continuity that I would create as a kid. It was aliens and spaceships, boys’ sort of stuff.”

Another theme came from that most relatable of experiences – seeing a horror movie that was a little too old for him. At the age of 11, Bromley saw John Carpenter’s 1982 horror movie The Thing and it flooded his young mind with ideas that continue to boil today.