Galleries - April 2013

THE STOUR GALLERY n Spring Exhibition - Cornwall & the West Country Featuring : Simon Pooley, JackDoherty, Peter Hayes and John Maltby. Showing throughout April into May 10 High Street, Shipston-on-Stour, Warwickshire CV36 4AJ T : 01608 664411 E : info@thestourgallery.co.uk Gallery open: Mon-Wed & Fri-Sat 10-5.30 Exhibition online at www.thestourgallery.co.uk Simon Pooley, ‘Trenow Spring’ acrylic on canvas,100 x 100cm Douglas Swan, who painted in the UK in the late 50s and early 60s. He’s a real discovery too, his scratchy, bold abstracts from 1962/3 standing the comparison with the great Roger Hilton with no difficulty at all. Now head off up into the Cotswolds proper and the pretty South Cotswold town ofTetbury where The Art Gallery, housed in a handsome Georgian house right in the middle, shows a wide range of attractive and affordable contemporary figurative painting. Continue your journey further north once more into the steep valleys east ofStroud, to Chalford, where one of the country’s leading sculpture foundries, Pangolin Editions has its exhibition space in a romantic Victorian mill. GalleryPangolin, as it is known, is this month showing art and craft pieces from their own workforce. A quick diversion into Cheltenham now brings us to Martin’s Gallery which, housed in a classically grand white stucco mansion, shows the kind ofart its collector/owner likes to buy himself: this month the cool Cornish influenced abstracts of local artist Jeff Powell. If architecture and gardens are more your sort ofthing though head out to the next grand house, Taddington Manor, near Cutsdean, where Architectural Heritage displays its mouth- watering range of20th C. and contemporary sculpture, house and garden ornaments – the latter including everything from fire surrounds to bird-baths and obelisks, as long as it’s in stone! Now we move into the absolute Cotswold heartland with Australian-born Celia Lendis’ subtly modernised Moreton-in- Marsh town-house showing some excellent contemporary work, this month Ange Mullen- Brywn’s dense, colour-saturated evocations ofthe Swedish lakes and forests she visits each summer. Guy Cohen’s longer-established Campden Gallery in nearby Chipping Campden has followed a not dissimilar programme over the last decade or so, his important Kurt Jackson show, ‘A One Mile Walk’, the outcome ofa classic Jackson project walking in the bony uplands ofthe Penwith peninsula. Meanwhile and close to the continued on page 57 As the starting-point ofthe south- western end ofthe Cotswold Way Walk, Bath provides as good a beginning as any for a survey of the region’s now increasingly rich and hugely varied artistic offering. This month the city’s contemporary shows are part- icularly strong with, to my mind, the greatest living British abstract painter, Basil Beattie, having a first exhibition at Hilton Fine Art , ofhis powerful ‘Janus’ series. If you don’t know his work yet these fierce, lyrical paintings are a good place to start. And then, down at the glorious 16th C. Bath Abbey, bo.lee projects, a new venture from the bo.lee gallery, is launching its first curated project. Entitled ‘Odyssey’, work by five leading contemporary artists, Damien Hirst and David Mach among them, has been brought together as an act of meditation on the routes we take in life and to remind us of the one common certainty. Further works by these artists can also be seen in their nearby Queen Street gallery. Meanwhile Anthony Hepworth, who has long been one ofthe city’s leading dealers, particularly of20th C. Art, is showing an American-born artist, Nicholas Usherwood highlights the abundance of art in this distinctive region North West of the Capital . . .