Category: Painting

Watch This Space – Lazinc Gallery

When you walk into a gallery, particularly one in Mayfair, you don’t expect to see such a hive of activity with paint being dripped, sets hammered, installations constructed, in other words a gallery being used as a working studio. For this is what is happening to the Lazinc Gallery for the coming weeks where some 25 contemporary urban artists from around the world will be transforming the place and offering the chance for visitors to watch the process of art in the making.

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Sara Shamma – Modern Slavery

When Syrian artist Sara Shamma heard eyewitness reports of Yazidi women and girls being paraded on a platform by their Isis kidnappers in a modern slave market on the Iraqi/Syrian border before hundreds of glowering men, and then sold to the highest bidder, she was naturally shocked. Their prices, she discovered, were even advertised on the internet – the youngest being the most expensive.

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Frost, Heron, Lanyon Scott: Four Giants of British Modernism

Terry Frost, Patrick Heron, Peter Lanyon and William Scott were groundbreaking British post-war artists who were inspired by the Cornish landscape. These major figures are featured in a new exhibition at Beaux Arts London entitled Giants of British Modernism. The four, together with many others such as Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson and Bernard Leach, were pioneers of British abstract art and were associated with the St Ives School. 

The fishing village of St Ives attracted artists for its spectacular scenery and the clarity of its light. Patricia Singh, co-director of Beaux Arts, ran the Will’s Lane Gallery in St Ives in the 1970s and knew three of the four artists well. Peter Lanyon had died in a glider crash in 1964. The exhibition features 5-6 works from each painter. In the following interview she was able to give me a personal insight into the artists’ works and the creativity behind them.

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Emma Stibbon – Fire and Ice

There’s a certain cinematic quality to much of Emma Stibbon’s work. Her landscape paintings, prints and drawings that have earned her an international reputation, depict environments in a state of turmoil and flux. Erupting volcanoes and retreating glaciers and ice shelves, are meat and drink to her. Her new solo exhibition, Fire and Ice, conveys a sense of drama, not only with what you see in the pictures themselves but also with the way in which they were made.  Her subjects show that apparent monumental and permanent geological structures can often turn out to be fragile at the hands of nature and mankind.

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Mao Jianhua – The Spirit of the Valley

“When you paint, you should feel empty and calm and the painting will come out automatically, full of energy, full of life.” So says 64-year-old Chinese artist Mao Jianhua whose first UK exhibition, The Spirit of the Valley has opened at London’s Saatchi Gallery.

The exhibition comprises a series of 48 landscapes in ink on paper rooted very much in the ancient Chinese tradition of Shan Shui. They reflect the  philosophy of universal harmony and immortality.  

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Paula Rego – Obedience and Defiance

There’s a scene in her son Nick Willing’s BBC documentary, timed to coincide with the opening of this exhibition, in which Paula Rego tells that the first thing her future husband said to her at a party in the 1950s was to ask her to take her knickers off. She complied. It seemed to encapsulate so much of the essence of this remarkable show at MK Gallery – explicit, sexually charged and compliant.

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