British Art News
The latest news in Modern and Contemporary British Art.
by Alex Leith
A queer arrangement
The second major show at Charleston’s new gallery in Lewes, Dorothy Hepworth and Patricia Preece, an Untold Story, raises more questions than it answers.
Winter highlights: UK public galleries
Highlights of British artists at public art galleries this winter.
Season’s greetings | Euan Uglow Christmas card at Austin/Desmond
Every December, until his death in 2000, the London-based artist, Euan Uglow, would think up a new design, and hand-produce around 300 cards to send out to friends and family.
This Uglow card is among a collection on show at Austin/Desmond’s viewing room until January 12, alongside works designed by David Jones, Alexander Mackenzie, Dennis Mitchell, Edward Wadsworth, CRW Nevinson, Mary Martin and Viola Paterson.
Under that vast Hebridean sky | Frances Macdonald at Portland Gallery
Iona, in the Western Isles of Scotland, has long attracted artists, keen to interpret the ever-shifting visual interplay between sea, sky and shoreline.
To that list you can add contemporary oil painter Frances Macdonald, currently enjoying a solo show – largely featuring oil paintings of Iona – at Portland Gallery, on Bennet St, St James
Sit! | Pluto, by Lucian Freud, at Browse and Darby
One of the great loves of Lucian Freud’s life was his dog Pluto, a whippet who he named after the Greek God of the Underworld.
Pluto was present in Freud’s studio from 1988 to her death in 2003, his most prolific period, and was frequently painted by the artist, with and without human companions.
You can see Freud’s 1988 etching of Pluto in the current exhibition at London gallery Browse & Darby, until January 24.
Charming wonkiness | Lucy Harwood, at Firstsite, Colchester
In 1920, 27-year-old Slade School graduate Lucy Harwood had an emergency appendix operation on the kitchen table of the house she lived in. 3 days later, it was discovered she was paralysed down her right side, and had lost the use of the right hand she painted with. But she was determined not to give up painting.
Lucy Harwood: Bold Impressions, which runs until April 14, is the third in an ongoing series at Firstsite exploring the careers of Benton End artists.
Magical ruralism | Sean Jefferson at David Messum Fine Art
Sean Jefferson: The Twelve Days of Christmas and Other Works runs at David Messum Fine Art, St James until December 22.
Each painting demands a careful reading, though few viewers will be able to decipher all the folkloric and spiritual symbols. It’s a feast of fairies, sprites, jesters, druids, winged dogs, ominous ravens, runic symbols, gnarly trees, medicinal herbs and slivers of moon in yellow skies.
Manet, meet Mondrian | Hurvin Anderson at Hastings Contemporary
In 2006, the painter Hurvin Anderson accompanied his father to his regular barbershop, situated in a converted attic in the centre of Birmingham.
It was a Jamaican barbershop, which made the father – a Windrush immigrant – feel at home, as it was designed to do, painted in bright colours, the walls covered with posters of iconic black figures and newspaper cuttings: a very Caribbean clutter.
Hurvin Anderson: Salon Paintings runs at Hastings Contemporary until March 3.
Splashy Sublime | Nick Archer at Long & Ryle
Discover the latest show at Long & Ryle gallery of Nick Archer, as well as a brief history of his practice.
Cosmic point | Li Yuan-chia, at Kettle’s Yard
In 1970 the Chinese experimental artist Li Yuan-Chi moved from London to the village of Banks, in Cumbria, just north of Hadrian’s Wall. His motive? To single-handedly convert a derelict farmhouse into an art centre, turning cowsheds into galleries.
Kettle’s Yard, in Cambridge, are running the exhibition Making New Worlds: Li Yuan-Chi and Friends, from November 11 to February 18, marking the profound impact the artist’s idiosyncratic Cumbrian venture had on 20th-century British art.
Disguised as doodlings | David Spiller at the Portland Gallery
A work by David Spiller is instantly recognisable. Influenced by Picasso and Dubuffet, as much as Disney and Warhol, his canvases, stitched together by hand, display a smorgasbord of competing styles and techniques. They are usually dominated by a representation of a cartoon character.
Spiller’s estate is represented in the UK by Portland Gallery on Bennet St, St James, which is, from November 8 – December 1, showing the last of a trilogy of exhibitions of his work, this one dedicated to his output between 2010 and his death in 2018.
Moving into another intensity | Anthony Eyton at Browse and Darby
2023 has been an eventful year for the painter Anthony Eyton. In May he celebrated his 100th birthday. In June he was awarded an OBE in King Charles’ first Birthday Honours, and was featured in an exhibition of portraits at Michael Richardson’s Art Space Gallery, alongside Arturo di Stefano. And in September he enjoyed the opening of a retrospective of his work at Browse and Darby. The show continues until November 10.
Dancing men, prancing goats | John Craxton at Pallant House Gallery
The lifelong rejection of authority and convention that shaped John Craxton’s life can be in large part explained by his childhood connection with West Sussex, and, in particular, with the city of Chichester, where he was sent to board at a choir school, aged 11.
Now he’s back. A posthumous retrospective of Craxton’s six-decade career, A Modern Odyssey, curated by his biographer Ian Collins, opens at Pallant House in Chichester this weekend.
Teenage Raphael | Clara Klinghoffer at Crossing Borders
It’s 1915, and the painter Bernard Meninsky, life drawing tutor at London’s Central School of Arts + Crafts, has been charged with looking through the portfolio of a fifteen-year-old girl, Clara Klinghoffer. A task which, one would imagine, he was expecting to be humdrum, turned out to be anything but. “Good Lord,” he stated. “That child draws like da Vinci.”
Klinghoffer’s 1923 painting Bananas, of an East End peddler, is included in the exhibition Crossing Borders: Internationalism in Modern British Art, at British Art Fair 2023.
Secular altarpiece | The Gold Metaverse, by David Breuer-Weil at SOLO CONTEMPORARY
A major work by the artist David Breuer-Weil will serve as the centrepiece and the entrance feature of the SOLO CONTEMPORARY section at British Art Fair. The piece, titled The Gold Metaverse, is inspired by the vast 15th-century polyptych The Ghent Altarpiece, by Hubert and Jan van Eyck, which dominates the interior of St Bavo’s Cathedral in the medieval Belgian city.
A restless wave | John Bellany at Lemon Street Gallery, Truro
In 1988 the Scottish figurative expressionist painter John Bellany was given a liver transplant by the pioneering surgeon Sir Roy Calne. “When he came to afterwards,” Calne later remembered, “he asked not for analgesics, but for paper and paint.”
Bellany had had liver disease for years, despite giving up alcohol in 1985, and his brush with death – and new lease of life – galvanised his art practice, enabling him to ‘see colours he hadn’t seen before’.
In the flesh | Marina Abramović at the RA
What do Frida Kahlo, Louise Bourgois, Barbara Hepworth, Georgia O’Keeffe, Berthe Morisot, Helen Frankenthaler, Bridget Riley, Tracey Emin, Leonora Carrington, Tamara de Lempicka, Angelica Kauffman, Artemisia Gentileschi, Yoko Ono, Gwen John, Yayoi Kusuma, Sarah Lucas, Cornelia Parker and Cindy Sherman have in common?
None of them have been given a solo exhibition in the main galleries of the Royal Academy, that’s what. In fact, NO woman has ever been given that honour in the 255-year history of Britain’s most prestigious venue.
Until now, that is.
Take a bow Marina Abramović…
Pure Colour | Robert Bevan at Harry Moore-Gwyn
From his work being described as ‘violent’ and ‘garish’ in 1905, to ‘the real pioneer of the English Modern School’ in 1926, Robert Bevan had a turbulent time winning over critics.
Being shown at British Art Fair by Harry Moore-Gwyn Fine Art, learn of the painters journey in our latest news piece.
Artfully insouciant | Sandra Blow, at Jenna Burlingham
In 1947 the 22-year-old St Martins and RA graduate Sandra Blow, daughter of a fruit wholesaler, embarked on a tour of Italy on a motorcycle, studying pre-Renaissance architecture and frescoes, and enrolling in the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome…
Alternative Eden | James Mortimer at SOLO CONTEMPORARY
If Eve hadn’t gone for that apple, would the Garden of Eden have remained, for evermore, an unspoilt, innocent paradise? James Mortimer’s surrealist, symbolic, uncanny paintings suggest not, describing an alternative Eden, where: ‘Freed from social constraint, people behave unthinkingly with a blissful lack of self-awareness, and once governed by their basest instincts soon find themselves given over to shameless naked abandon: to foolish acts of wanton violence, sexual impropriety and long afternoons of listless indolence’.