ART / David Simon

David Simon specialises in Contemporary and Modern British artists. He established the gallery in Somerset in 2006, after managing a gallery in Mayfair. The gallery, in Castle Cary, has a programme of monthly curated exhibitions, highlighting both emerging and established artists including paintings, ceramics and bronze sculpture.

This spring the gallery has chosen to fill its programme with plenty of variety, with a double exhibition running throughout March and April across its two showrooms in Castle Cary, Somerset.

George Dannatt (1915 - 2009): Landscape Observations, is a collection of more than fifty paintings by this outstanding and inspirational figure in the story of the St Ives School of Art.

George Dannatt represented a rare breed of cultural polymath: music critic, practising artist, connoisseur, and collector of modern art. His career as an artist spanned more than five decades. The paintings in this exhibition are a retrospective selection dating from 1961-2007 rooted in his observation of the landscape of the southwest of England. During his lifetime Dannatt had his work exhibited in London, Switzerland, Germany, as well as across the south of England. b500 magazine

DAVID SIMON

The Art Market

At first glance his paintings, often on a small scale, seem abstract in the full sense of the word; disconnected from our world; studies of pattern through geometry, precise line and a fascination with contrasting surface textures. Dannatt’s work is both absorbing and intellectual and invites the viewer to spend time with it. In many of the works in this collection, looking beyond the modernist forms, ideas of horizon, coast, sky and land emerge and, so, maintain the interest of the eye and imagination and ultimately keeps you coming back for more.

The painting “White Hill to Fleet”, 2005 is an excellent example of George Dannatt’s thought process and practice. This work is based on a very distant view of a stretch of the Fleet and Chesil Bank as George described it: “a scene which one might produce by observing a long distance

JOHN PIPER (1903 - 1992) Smailholm Tower, 1975 gouache on paper 39.4 x 58.4cm through half-closed eyes” pinpointing a small area at the top of the painting, and then obscuring the intervening landscape to contribute to the feeling of distance.

David Simon Contemporary is delighted and privileged to be working with the George Dannatt Trust. We represent a broad overview of the work of George Dannatt a decade after his death. This collection of his work from the 1960’s through five decades, carefully selected by David Simon, charts his exploration of geometry, form and space and relating hard abstraction to references of landscape. Paintings by this artist can be found in the permanent collections of Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, Bournemouth University, Southampton City Art Gallery, and Royal Air Force, as well as other important public collections.

GEORGE DANNATT (1915 - 2009) A Colour Composition - Dominant Red, 1995 oil on black paper 22.8 x 28.8cm

ANDREW LANSLEY Pound Lake egg tempera on gesso panel 31 x 31cm

‘In Arcadia’ – Exploring the British landscape through a wide range of living contemporary painters, this uplifting exhibition brings a refreshing vision from both gallery and guest artists. Andrew Lansley (Chair of the Bath Society of Artists), Ben Lowe, David Brayne, James Lynch and Kate Lynch, offer a diverse range of depictions of English landscapes in a myriad of styles and different approaches. Somerset painter, Mike Service has created a series of oil paintings of still life subjects with garden flowers in thick, impasto oil paint, quickly sculpted onto the canvas with palette knife. Dynamic interpretations of the Scottish borders are brought by John Piper (1903 - 1992) and more abstract examinations of landscape themes are represented in the works of Brian Rice and Vanessa Gardiner. The exhibition connects living, contemporary painters with mid-century, Modern British artists. There is also a fine selection of signed, original etchings and drawings by Ben Nicholson, Henry Moore and by Eileen Cooper RA. These are very rare and collectible pieces and form an interesting visual link between these two exhibitions, in terms of their compositions running through the spectrum from representational to semi-figurative to hard abstraction. These exhibitions can be seen at the gallery until 16th April and also on our website. Looking ahead to the start of summer, we are busy securing works for our major Pop Art exhibition, including works by Roy Lichtenstein, Keith Haring, Patrick Caulfield and David Hockney. A diversion from the gallery’s usual concentration on contemporary and modern British painters, this bold and colourful exhibition is a conversation about the roles of British and American artists in one of the most powerful art movements of the 20th century. GEORGE DANNATT (1915 - 2009) Whitehill to Fleet, 2005 oil and graphite on board 107.5 x 38cm

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