Philip Hicks
front cover
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Behold a White Horse No 1 oil on board 61 x 46 cms 24 x 18 ins
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Solarium V oil on canvas 31 x 25 cms 12 x 9 7⁄8 ins
Philip Hicks recent new works “Like all fine artists Philip Hicks gets us to see the commonplace differently, and by re-appreciating his chosen subject we can perhaps re-appreciate part of ourselves...� Terence Brady, Author and Playwright
2018 www.messums.com 28 Cork Street, London W1S 3NG Telephone: +44 (0)20 7437 5545
Philip Hicks When has Philip Hicks not been making art, not been finding ways of charming our eyes? In a gentle and courteous way, may we not now be allowed to say he has gained the status of grandee? Looking back at the anti-Vietnam War collage pieces he made in the early 1970s, or the cool rhythmic abstracts that followed, he was then in
In working his way through a career of roads taken, ideas explored, of knowledge acquired of the potentials of art, how then do the elements of Hicks’s current pictures work – how might he have arrived at them, and what might he be trying to make with these works?
those long-legged days always fresh and adept at exploring fields of sophistication, on the crest of where the zeit was geisting, always demonstrating heightened levels of inquisition and instinct to convey ideas through paint and canvas and construction. The evolution of Hicks’s art to the paintings of today is more fascinating still, a maturing that seems on the face of it like a process of simplifications, but which instead carries a realm of alternative beauties and resonances, and the making of a different, image-based language. The world of easy-looking ideas that Hicks produces these days is not so easy to accomplish, and the balances and controlled potency of his images are the result of an evolution of understandings by someone who has been striving over many years to find the right way of saying the right things through art.
On the face of it, he has arrived at a place of sunny uplands, a tempting and naturalistic world, delicious in its rural realities, in the direct clarity of its imagery, the full glare of its primary palette, the familiar family of figures – those famous sheep - the creation of a world directly observed, dearly taken to his bosom and then offered back at the viewer with a decidedly ungrand lack of painterliness. The question of style is an interesting one. It is as though Hicks is withdrawing overt sophistication - too much painters’ pomposity – from the style he has chosen to evolve for these works. They are linear and graphic, and come from a language group that offers common access, an in-built wide appeal. These are pictures that appear to be the opposite of clever-clever.
There is, of course, a good sprinkling of similar graphic strains – and similar lightening touches – in Modern British art, from John Minton to Mary Fedden, (the journey into paint sometimes having leaked from printmaking). One of the things that strikes one singularly about Hicks’s work is that this graphic strain – this clarified representation of imagery – is accompanied by an astonishing palette, a sense of colour that is vibrant, wilful, anything but calm, going in often far more lively directions than the expected realistic tone. It works superbly well, for Hicks is a master colourist. And however brave these choices are, the chemistry is always sound, the recipe delectable. He knows his stuff, does this former student of Chelsea School of Art and the Royal Academy Schools. His exuberant use of colour, most especially in those flat, intense areas of background yellow and orange, purple and green - those colourfields - makes the pictures work in a bigger way, providing the viewer with an experience that takes into account the flatness of the surface of the paint, and the parallel idea that the space might also represent something: a field, the sky, the sea. Hicks touches on big ideas, softly sophisticated questions relating to abstraction and realism, which in no way collide with the prime experience of meeting his paintings, and having a core response to the imagery placed in front of you. That imagery is the heart of the matter. The plants, the sheep, the boats. The sheep were his thing from early on, and begin to appear in sets of studies from the mid-1980s. (In 2004 he had a show entirely devoted to sheep.) One thinks of Henry Moore’s numerous studies of sheep, and his use of them as a way of sharpening his eye, as a route to responding to live subjects. Hicks’s early studies of sheep betray a similar sense of intense observation, but also clearly were part of an increasing process of bonding to rural life that the artist has made central to his work, and which has now evolved to include a basket-full of objects from the natural world, such as fish, birds, leaves and trees, to which he has added the larger beasts of boats and houses. Undoubtedly, what this use of imagery helps us to realise is that Hicks’ long journeying through art has ended up with a statement that allies beauty with simplicity. His images are stark and straightforward – they mean what they say. They glory in an open natural world, the easily observed, the day-to-day consciousness of country living. Perfection seems to lie in the ordinariness of the unspoiled world, shriven of frills, ambitions and tutoring. With Hicks at the helm, however, the development and use of this visual language, this vocabulary of images, inevitably has
recognisable consequences – useful and interesting resonances. Hicks the artist, the man who has played with so many artistic ideas in the past, cannot but help us look for his awareness of what it is to place such brazen images onto canvas. Further ideas softly arise about the role of imagery in art, about how an image represents an idea of something, the power of suggestion that lies therein, the harmonies that ring out when particular images breathe next to each other.
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Life Cycle I oil on canvas 71 x 92 cms 28 x 36 1⁄4 ins
This is where these paintings score highly. Something within them allows them to offer, like other paintings of real worth, basements and sub-basements of possible gratification and involvement. Their peculiar characteristic is undoubtedly and primarily a charm, as they conjure up longed-for every-day moments in the clean air of the country, the intimacy of life never quite experienced. However, once they have you in their grip, these works surprise you with wit and poetry, with intellectual stimulation and enquiry, and engage you with a philosophy for life that makes you realise just why these paintings are a high-water mark in this grandee’s substantial career.
Sandy Mallet
Author and art historian
As I see it If I had been born a generation earlier I would certainly have been an abstract painter. I would have been a part of the group of English painters, Scott, Hilton, Frost, Blow, influenced by the Americans, such as Klein and Motherwell, and Soulages and Poliakoff in Paris, to name just a few. In fact my wife and I, the sculptor Jill Tweed, got to know those English artists quite well. We mixed with them in London and down at St Ives. But they were them and I was me. I loved their abstract work, but it was already done. You could learn from it, but not copy it. Two American painters showed a way forward, where figurative imagery could be combined with abstraction: Robert Rauschenberg and Larry Rivers. Larry we got to know and I stayed with him in New York. Ivon Hitchens and Ben Nicholson were British examples of this dual approach, and I began to feel more in tune with it. Robert Motherwell once said that there were two sorts of artists: those who painted holes in walls and those who painted the wall. He also said that the most important invention in modern painting was collage. At the Royal Academy Schools I had become a good draughtsman and there, and for a while after, had painted in deep space perspective, thus making holes in the wall. But I began to realise that the modern painters I really liked did not do that; they painted flat, on the wall. I began to follow them. After two solo shows in London in the 1950s and early 1960s, I first hit the headlines with a body of work I made in memory of my father who had died. A gallant man, he had been a regular soldier and had fought right through both World Wars. I called the work ‘Vietnam Requiem’ and it was about the tragedy of war, comprising eight large painted reliefs ranging from two to four metres in dimension, with supporting drawings, collages and prints. It was first shown at the Camden Arts Centre Festival exhibition, London, with a supporting show of collages and prints at the Robert Self Gallery off Bond Street, and then it travelled to Brighton, Manchester, Durham and Edinburgh, where Richard Demarco presented it for the
Festival. It was later acquired by the Imperial War Museum, where it was given a second London showing. I had pulled out all the stops: construction, shaped boards, heads modelled and cast in fibreglass, painted abstraction and full realism all combined. About eighteen months of work, but, by its nature, a one-off. Afterwards, during the 1970s and 1980s, I returned to pure painting. I decided that in order to find out more about colour, a neglected area in my art education, I would dispense with the problems of working figuratively and confine myself to pure colour and simple geometric forms. This meant full abstraction and these paintings met with some success. I had solo shows here and in Europe, but the important thing for me was that having been a tonal painter, now I was a colourist. One of the hardest things for painters over the last hundred years is how to deal with the fact that photography is the prime source of imagery in society. Colour and the physicality of paint are one answer. Apart from the Vietnam Requiem, triggered by a unique event, my passion has always been for places—land and sea in particular— rarely the urban scene, even though we lived in London. But every year
Spring
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Seedtime oil on canvas 91 x 71 cms 35 7⁄8 x 28 ins
Summer
I would make trips out, favouring the coasts or wilder places like Dartmoor where I would draw and photograph, building up a bank of images and experiences that I might one day use. Thus in the late 1970s and through the 1980s. when the New Art Centre became my London dealers, I began to integrate abstraction and the figurative image, the result being paintings with my own voice but with a nod also in the direction of earlier painters like Ben Nicholson. They were landscapes and seascapes, with the occasional still life. In the late 1980s recession hit and many fine galleries closed, including the New Art Centre, which moved to Wiltshire, and Gallery 10 in Grosvenor Street, where I had found a new home and had two solo shows. Jill and I left London for West Oxfordshire, not an unexpected move; our children had grown up and we were both country born and bred. We built good studios, embraced village life, but were still only an hour and a half from London. My work was more strongly influenced by the move than I had bargained for. Making trips into the landscape from London was one thing; living in it was another. Sheep appeared in my paintings in the mid-1980s. I first saw them, running free, on Dartmoor. All over the roads, they owned the place and I felt an immediate affinity, but they did not really become my main subject until our move, when we were surrounded by them. I started to study them, draw them, photograph them. This continued for several years and I worked at it all over
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Moonlight Sonata oil on canvas 61 x 51 cms  23 7⠄8 x 20 ins
the country from Shetland to Cornwall. I grew very fond of them as creatures, as characters, which they are, and the paintings which resulted had a high degree of loose realism which hid the abstraction
Autumn
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Serenade to Autumn 3 oil on canvas 80 x 80 cms 311⁄2 x 311⁄2 ins
Winter
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Lakeside: Evening oil on canvas 61 x 91 cms 24 x 357⁄8 ins
involved in the colour and placing of the images. These were the paintings which Messum’s began to exhibit in the mid-1990s. Picasso said something I have always remembered: “To copy others is sometimes necessary; to copy oneself is despicable”. Well about two years ago I began to feel that I was copying myself. My work had become predictable—to me at any rate—and although I had branched out from my sheep paintings here and there, I felt I was getting myself, as an artist, stuck in a place I didn’t want to be. Something radical had to happen.
It’s taken two years of work and experiment and I have destroyed about half of my production, but I have now achieved a fresh synthesis of figurative and abstract, where the realist elements are collaged over the abstract colour planes—except they’re not collaged, they’re painted. This enables me to use wide ranges of subject matter and gives me complete freedom as to colour and composition. I feel this new work is where the varied strands of my career all come together.
Philip Hicks
The Sea
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Under the Night Sky oil on canvas 51 x 61 cms  20 x 24 ins
Spring
“Colour inspiration comes from more than one source – nature, the seasons, other paintings and my own predilections.”
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Lifelines oil on canvas 71 x 152 cms 28 x 60 ins
Spring
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Life Springs Eternal oil on canvas 25 x 36 cms 9 7⁄8 x 14 ins
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Snapshot oil on canvas 51 x 61 cms  20 x 24 ins
Spring
“When I start a picture it is all colour harmonies. This fits in with my musical sense – the figuration comes later.”
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Warmth of the Sun 2 oil on canvas 51 x 41 cms 20 x 161⁄8 ins
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Garden Life oil on board 51 x 61 cms  20 x 24 ins
Spring
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Greensward oil on canvas 61 x 51 cms 237⁄8 x 20 ins
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Ancient Mysteries, Ring of Brodgar oil on canvas 76 x 102 cms 30 x 40 1⁄8 ins
Spring
“Hicks... certainly learnt to draw, but colour fascinated him, and seeing it he says ‘as a kind of carrier of emotion’ he set about exploring its possibilities for himself. No wonder this personal discovery became one of his most powerful themes...” Stephen Gardiner, Architect, Author and Critic
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Spring Solstice oil on canvas 41 x 76 cms 16 x 30 ins
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Rustle of Spring oil on canvas 71 x 122 cms  28 x 48 ins
Summer
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Gateway I oil on canvas 51 x 71 cms 20 1⁄8 x 28 ins
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Gateway 2 oil on canvas 51 x 61 cms 20 x 23 7⁄8 ins
Summer
“Being a fairly skilled musician certainly affects my painting – colour harmonies are all important.”
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Parkland 2 oil on canvas 51 x 61 cms 19 7⁄8 x 23 7⁄8 ins
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Hymn to Nature 1 oil on canvas 61 x 76 cms 24 x 29 7⁄8 ins
Summer
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Solar Power II oil on canvas 102 x 76 cms 40 x 29 7⁄8 ins
Summer
“I was trained at the RA Schools to learn to draw – I like my paintings to have a figurative element.”
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Parkland 1 oil on canvas 61 x 51 cms 23 7⁄8 x 19 7⁄8 ins
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From Earth to Sky oil on canvas 61 x 76 cms 24 x 29 7⁄8 ins
Summer
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Warmth of the Sun oil on canvas 36 x 46 cms 14 x 18 1⁄8 ins
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Meadowland oil on canvas 41 x 51 cms 16 1⁄8 x 20 ins
Autumn
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Autumn Ablaze oil on canvas 61 x 46 cms 237⁄8 x 18 ins
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Serenade to Autumn 4 oil on canvas 61 x 76 cms 24 1⁄8 x 30 ins
Autumn
“I often start a picture without knowing what is going into it, but this comes to me in the process of making it.”
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Autumn in the Woods oil on canvas 40 x 61 cms 153⁄4 x 237⁄8 ins
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Serenade to Autumn 1 oil on canvas 51 x 76 cms 19 7⁄8 x 29 7⁄8 ins
Autumn
“There is a sense of performance, as in music, when I tackle a painting and, like good jazz, one needs to improvise en route throughout the piece.”
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Serenade to Autumn 2 oil on canvas 80 x 80 cms 311⁄2 x 311⁄2 ins
Autumn
“All my paintings come from inspiration gathered from nature – I’m not good at imaginary subjects.”
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Flight of the Migrant oil on canvas 76 x 102 cms 30 1⁄8 x 40 1⁄8 ins
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Harvest and Seedtime oil on canvas 51 x 76 cms 20 1⁄8 x 30 ins
Autumn
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Ancient Mysteries, Stone of Stenness oil on canvas 36 x 56 cms  14 x 22 ins
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Park by Sunset oil on canvas 51 x 61 cms 20 x 237⁄8 ins
Winter
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Man and Nature oil on canvas 51 x 61 cms 197⁄8 x 24 ins
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Riverside oil on canvas 46 x 61 cms 18 x 237⁄8 ins
Winter
“I have always tried to present nature in different ways in order to contribute a personal view. If it works it is so much more refreshing to the viewer.”
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Near the Bridge oil on canvas 66 x 56 cms 261⁄8 x 22 ins
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Hymn to Nature 2 oil on canvas 76 x 61 cms 30 1⁄8 x 24 ins
Winter
“I like it when people say to me that my pictures open their eyes to something new.”
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Snowfall: Pale Winter Sun oil on canvas 76 x 152 cms 30 x 60 ins
Winter
“Nocturnal contrasts, particularly in winter, have always interested me.”
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Winter Moon: Comet Passing: Bird at Window oil on board 38 x 60 cms 15 x 231⁄2 ins
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Low Sun in Winter oil on canvas 41 x 51 cms  16 x 20 ins
Winter
“Machine trimmed hedgerows are a modern phenomena, but for me they afford a new perspective on nature.”
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The Leaves Have Fallen II oil on canvas 76 x 102 cms 30 x 40 ins
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Winter Painting oil on canvas 76 x 102 cms 30 x 40 1⁄8 ins
Winter
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A Peaceful Countryside oil on canvas 91 x 122 cms  36 x 48 ins
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The Leaves Have Fallen I oil on canvas 76 x 127 cms  30 x 50 ins
The Sea
“I like to work like a collagist would, cutting and filling out the picture with images, but I paint in what I call harmonies and rhythms, and add the figurative and decorative detail later.”
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Waves oil on canvas 40 x 51 cms 15 7⁄8 x 19 7⁄8 ins
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Voyaging, Sea and Sky oil on canvas 76 x 102 cms  30 x 40 ins
The Sea
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Still Waters oil on canvas 80 x 80 cms 311⁄2 x 311⁄2 ins
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Lochside, N.W. Highlands oil on canvas 80 x 80 cms 311⁄2 x 311⁄2 ins
The Sea
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Ocean 1 oil on canvas 51 x 61 cms 20 x 23 7⁄8 ins
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Ocean 2 oil on canvas 51 x 61 cms 20 1⁄8 x 24 ins
The Sea
“Most of my working time is spent getting rid of what I have painted – meaningful simplicity is what I am after.”
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Ocean 3 oil on canvas 36 x 46 cms 14 x 18 ins
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Voyage’s End oil on canvas 61 x 51 cms 23 7⁄8 x 20 ins
The Sea
“...as well as being a brilliant draughtsman Hicks is an outstanding colourist. Hicks’s art delights for many complex reasons and two very simple ones; that it is beautiful to behold, and above all that it says yes to life...” John Russell Taylor, Author and Art Critic (The Times)
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Seafarers oil on canvas 34 x 36 cms 13 1⁄4 x 14 1⁄8 ins
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Vista oil on canvas 61 x 92 cms 24 x 361⁄4 ins
Philip
- The book Studio Publications ISBN 978-1-908486-45-5 Hardback 265 x 217mm (Portrait), 160 pages, 96 full colour and 20 black and white illustrations.
Philip
John Russell Taylor
£35 John Russell Taylor has worked at The Times for most of his writing life, as, successively, Television Critic, Drama Critic, Film Critic, American Cultural Correspondent and, for the last twenty-five years, Art Critic. During his American period he was Professor in the Cinema Division of the University of Southern California, Los Angeles; he has lectured and broadcast extensively, and written more than fifty books on subjects of art, film, theatre and cultural history, including biographies of Alfred Hitchcock, Alec Guinness and Claude Monet. He lists his hobbies “buying books and talking to strange dogs”.
After nearly 60 years, Philip Hicks is one of Britain’s most admired contemporary painters; his work, marked by bold colour and abstract arrangements of pastoral motifs, practically illustrates both modern Romanticism and British pop. His distinguished military family sent him to Sandhurst, and probably never anticipated his desire to become an artist. But after an injury saw him invalided out of the army, Hicks followed studies at Chelsea and the RA Schools with creative exploration and experimentation during years that saw some of the most traumatic conflicts and exciting cultural developments of the 20 th Century. In becoming the painter he is today, Hicks changed media, content and focus countless times, and sometimes controversially,
but never lost sight of his need to make artwork that, generously and without polemic, spoke to the world around him. In this survey of Hicks’s work and career, celebrated critic John Russell Taylor combines cultural analysis, artist’s interviews and contemporary accounts to explore an artist whose work both celebrates and subverts the very Britishness of his subject matter and background. Today, Hicks shares success with his wife, the sculptor Jill Tweed, and their daughter Nicola Hicks, also a renowned sculptor. Still painting well into his 80s, his generosity is equally tireless, and he continues to support the Artist’s General Benevolent Institution, of which he is a former Chairman and Vice President.
Slipcased book with signed and numbered print Limited edition slipcased book includes a limited edition print ‘Eclipse’ (see left) (edition of 100) – signed and numbered by the artist. Book £35 Print £95 Total £130
2018 Exhibition price
£95
offer for the duration of the exhibition only
Public and Corporate Collections include:
Tate Gallery; Victoria and Albert Museum; Imperial War Museum; Contemporary Art Society; Royal College of Music; Nuffield Foundation; Control Data, London; Chandris Shipping, London; Newsweek; De Beers; APV Holdings; Leicester County Council; Mirror Group; Wates Limited; National Westminster Bank, London; British Petroleum; Reckitt and Coleman.
Awards: 1977
British Council Award
Solo Exhibitions include:
1956 St George’s Gallery, London 1967 Marjorie Parr Gallery, London 1971 Camden Arts Centre, London; Richard Demarco Gallery, Edinburgh Festival; Gardener Arts Centre, University of Sussex; Robert Self Gallery, London 1972/4 Peterloo Gallery, Manchester 1973/5 Compendium Galleries, Birmingham 1975 Imperial War Museum, London 1977/9 Galerie VECU, Antwerp 1977 Battersea Arts Centre ‘Retrospective Exhibition’, London 1977/80 Oxford Gallery, Oxford 1980/2 New Art Centre, London 1980 Gallery 22, Dublin 1985 Galleri Engstrom, Stockholm 1986/91 Gallery 10, London 1986/90 Bohun Gallery, Henley-on-Thames 1991 Brian Sinfield Gallery, Burford 1996/97/99/2000/01/04/05/09 Messum’s, London 1999/2001 Alpha House Gallery, Sherborne 2003/07 John Davies Gallery, Stow-on-the-Wold 2011 Messum’s, London 2013 Messum’s, London 2018 Messum’s, London
Group Exhibitions include:
1957/89 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, London 1957/8 ‘Artists of Fame and Promise’, Leicester Galleries, London 1976 ‘Contemporary Prints 1970–75’, Tate Gallery, London 1980 De Beers International Collection, Mall Galleries, London 1980/1 ‘Israel Observed’, Israel Museum, Jerusalem 1982 ‘Contemporary Choice’, Serpentine Gallery, London 1985 ‘Riverside Open’, Riverside Studios, London; ‘Small is Beautiful’, Angela Flowers Gallery, London 1988 ‘London Original Print Fair’, Royal Academy, London 1991 ‘Water’s Edge’, Bohun Gallery, Henley-on-Thames 1992 ‘French Landscape’, Waterman Fine Art, London ‘Contemporaries’, Richmond Gallery, Cork Street, London 1993 Mistral Galleries, London 1994 ‘Separate Easels’, Alresford Gallery, Alresford
opposite
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Autumn’s End
CDXLV
ISBN 978-1-910993-37-8 Publication No: CDXLV Published by David Messum Fine Art © David Messum Fine Art
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without the prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Studio, Lords Wood, Marlow, Buckinghamshire. Tel: 01628 486565 www.messums.com Photography: Steve Russell, Peter Harris Printed by DLM-Creative
oil on canvas 76 x 61 cms 30 x 24 ins
back cover
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Ocean I oil on canvas 80 x 80 cms 311⁄2 x 311⁄2 ins
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