British Art News
The latest news in Modern and Contemporary British Art.
by Alex Leith
ANITA KLEIN | EVERYDAY DIVINITY
It would be easy to walk past an Anita Klein work, without paying it the scrutiny it deserves.
On the face of it, her subject matter is quotidian, familial, twee even. A dark-haired, early-middle-aged female figure is usually involved in some sort of activity with her friends or family: planting seedlings; playing snakes and ladders; swimming in the rain, stirring sugar into an espresso.
EMILY YOUNG | SHATTERED VISAGES
Emily Young has created four sculptures especially for British Art Fair, to be shown by Willoughby Gerrish. The largest of these, Earth Dreamer I, will be erected outside Saatchi Gallery in Duke of York Square, for the duration of the weekend and until October 26.
MARCELLE HANSELAAR | ‘THE INNER AND THE OUTER’
‘The magic of painting’, states the London-based Dutch artist Marcelle Hanselaar, in a recent interview with FAD Magazine, ‘is that you can show the inner and the outer, the suggestive or the interpretative, on the same plane’.
CHARLES GINNER | CAVE PAINTING
The Cave of the Golden Calf, London’s first-ever night club, was opened in July 1912 by writer and socialite Frida Strindberg, as a space for artists and other bohemian types looking for a spot which, as the New York Times put it, was ‘brazenly expressive of the libertarian pleasure principle’. It was in a low-ceilinged basement in Heddon Street in Soho (formerly a draper’s studio) and great attention was paid to its interior design, with primitivist wall paintings by Wyndham Lewis, Spencer Gore and Charles Ginner.
WEST WALTON | JOHN PIPER’S LOVE OF ‘EXQUISITE DECAY’
John Piper (1903-1992) was a remarkable polymath, a writer and editor as well as a prolific artist, who worked across numerous genres and styles, from abstract painting to opera set design to stained-glass windows. But he will, perhaps, be best remembered as a draughtsman and painter of gloweringly picturesque landscapes, with a penchant for historic English buildings. And particularly buildings which had deteriorated into what he described as ‘an exquisite state of decay’.
PORTAL PAINTERS | PETER LAYZELL
Portal Painters have been building up their stable of artists for over 60 years, and they have a distinct MO, when it comes to choosing who to represent. The gallery use the term ‘idiosyncratic’: their painters’ styles are instantly recognisable, once you have seen a piece of their work.
GLYN PHILPOT | FLESH AND SPIRIT
On the face of it, the Glyn Philpot show at Pallant House Gallery in Chichester, Flesh and Spirit, tells the story of Philpot ‘going Picasso’ (as The Scotsman saw it), shapeshifting from a fashionable, traditional and hugely successful society portrait painter, into an experimental Modernist
ALAN COTTON | LIGHT IS LIFE
“The coast is a drama,” says landscapist Alan Cotton, “where the sea is constantly attacking the land: trying to destroy it. That dynamic… is like a life force.” Brought up in a working-class home in Redditch, the acclaimed landscape painter didn’t even see the sea until he was 14.
JOHN BLACKBURN | SEVEN DECADES OF PAINTING
“White is the whole reason for me painting”.So says John Blackburn, who is celebrating his ninetieth birthday with his seventh exhibition at Mayfair gallery Osborne Samuel (September 8 – 23).
BEAUX ARTS, BATH | NEW CERAMICS, NEW PAINTING, NEW SCULPTURE
Mark Johnston was brought up in the north-east of England, and has lived most of his adult life in Sussex. He has spent long periods of time sketching in other parts of the country (Cumbria, for example; the Munros in Scotland) and Europe (he has lived in Greece, Andalucia and Barcelona).
INTERVIEW: WILLOUGHBY GERRISH
How long have you been involved in the art market?I started working for the Fine Art Society as a student in Edinburgh in 2005. I then went on to work at the Fine Art Society in London, and latterly with Robert Bowman.
DAVID TINDLE AT 90 | ‘STRANGE BEAUTIES’
In 1951, on the eve of his first art exhibition, in London, the 19-year-old painter David Tindle thumbed through the phone book, to help sprinkle some stardust onto the occasion. He discovered that one of his heroes – John Minton – was listed, and gave him a cold call.
INTERVIEW: WILLOUGHBY GERRISH
How long have you been involved in the art market?I started working for the Fine Art Society as a student in Edinburgh in 2005. I then went on to work at the Fine Art Society in London, and latterly with Robert Bowman.
BEAUX ARTS, BATH | NEW CERAMICS, NEW PAINTING, NEW SCULPTURE
Mark Johnston was brought up in the north-east of England, and has lived most of his adult life in Sussex. He has spent long periods of time sketching in other parts of the country (Cumbria, for example; the Munros in Scotland) and Europe (he has lived in Greece, Andalucia and Barcelona).
JOHN BLACKBURN | SEVEN DECADES OF PAINTING
“White is the whole reason for me painting”.So says John Blackburn, who is celebrating his ninetieth birthday with his seventh exhibition at Mayfair gallery Osborne Samuel (September 8 – 23).
EILEEN MAYO: SUPERSITTER
It would be worth betting that the sitter for this painting, Girl with Powder and Puff, by Laura Knight, is none other than Eileen Mayo, an artist in her own right who earlier this year was given a retrospective show at Towner Gallery. This would probably date the painting to c1926-30, when Mayo regularly sat for Knight, as well as her husband Harold.
INTERVIEW | CHRISTOPHER KINGZETT
How long have you been involved in the art market? I started at Christie’s in 1980 in the Old Master Department, followed by around 32 years at Agnews.
MARY FEDDEN | OH-SO ENGLISH STILL LIFES
Mary Fedden didn’t arrive at the style she is now most recognised for – calm, colourful, studiously naïve still lifes, recalling Braque and Matisse, but very English – until she was in her 50s.
ELISABETH FRINK | ‘NERVOUS NASTINESS’
It’s often been written that Elisabeth Frink’s bronze statuettes Assassins I and Assassins II, both made in 1963, were a response to the shooting of John F Kennedy. Frink herself always said that they were ‘associated with the killing, rather than inspired by it’. A quick bit of research shows that the sculptures were shown in a solo exhibition of her work opening at the Wadsworth Gallery, London, on November 28th of that year.
OLIVIA STANTON | BEHIND THE CURVE
Olivia Stanton has worked at the Chelsea art materials shop Green & Stone for 50 years; as an artist she is represented by Candida Stevens, the Chichester-based gallerist. This two-week show is a collaboration between Green & Stone Gallery and Stevens, and displays work produced by the Hastings-based abstractionist over the last four years.