SUMMER EXHIBITION 2022 | THE REDFERN GALLERY
Margaret Mellis (1914 - 2009) Bottles, Round Table and Sea (1952), oil on canvas, 76.2 x 50.8cm
The Redfern Gallery, in Cork Street, is one of London’s longest-established Modern and Contemporary art galleries, founded back in 1923, when Mayfair was a rather less salubrious place.
Their annual Summer Exhibition is always a welcome blast of colour during a period when many galleries shut up for the summer. This year, as ever, the list of exhibited artists reads like a who’s who of the 20th-century and contemporary art scene.
Eileen Agar, Craigie Aitchison, Sarah Armstrong-Jones, Patrick Caulfield, Marc Chagall, Lucian Freud, Annabel Gault, John Hoyland, Fiona Lewis, Roy Lichtenstein, Cedric Morris, Pablo Picasso, John Piper and Bridget Riley all have works on show, and I’ve missed out a number of illustrious names in that list.
Margaret Mellis (1914 - 2009, pictured) is, perhaps, one of the less well-known artists in the show, but her star is in the ascendancy after a timely retrospective at the excellent Towner Eastbourne earlier this year. She was in the first wave of artists to move to St Ives (at the outbreak of WW2, with her first husband, the art critic Adrian Stokes), attracting the likes of Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth into the community. She was best known as a colourist, who was influenced by Nicholson to work in relief and collage. Later in her life, after moving to Suffolk, she created extraordinary constructions from salvaged driftwood. In the 90s she became a friend and mentor to a young Damien Hirst.
As well as its extensive stock of work from 20th-century artists, The Redfern Gallery represents over 30 contemporary names whose work will be well represented in the show, which runs until September 9, at 20 Cork Street, London.