Exhibition preview: David Breuer-Weil: Project 4, The Vaults, London, until March 1 2013

In 2001, David Breuer-Weil presented some of his eye-catching, huge sculptures – which have included evolution-of-man style figures, cast in black and appearing to sink into mud and grass – in the crypt of the Roundhouse.

Two years later, the follow-up – the sensibly-named Project 2 – took to the Bargehouse on the Southbank. And Project 3 set up shop in the dusty confines of a disused multi-storey car park in Covent Garden.

Project 4, in the subterranean vaults beneath Waterloo, actually has a story stretching even further back. Breuer-Weil initially conceived the idea of painting his works in 1989, but committing them to canvas has probably been a secondary consideration considering their scale, not to mention his commissions during the past few years for locations including Chatsworth House, in Derbyshire, and two public outdoor spaces in London.

He describes the batch of more than 70 canvasses as “a monument to humanity and modern life”. Inspired by the capital and often realised in characteristically towering style (some of the works measure several feet), they continue his concerns with the human condition, philosophy, politics and the absurd.

If those sound like themes which might provide more dramatic material than ever in 2013, Breuer-Weil seems to be responding with gusto: fire and water, boxes, scrolls, books, cosmology and scientific structures are some of his mediums, promising a sense of the cinematic and disorientating.

• The Vaults, Arch 233, Leake Street, London. Open 10am-6pm (12pm-4pm Sunday). Admission free.

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