Galleries - October 2013

was included in the Tate’s 1985 ‘St Ives 1939-64’ and later lived there permanently) and there is no doubtingher fundamental place within British abstraction. There has been no major retro- spective since her death, a fact Kings Place Gallery , working with the Sandra Blow Estate, are addressing. Utilising the large, light public spaces as well as the gallery itself the exhibition in- cludes 20 major works as well as prints and drawings. Ms Blow, one feels, would have approved. PP Graham Sutherland When he died, in 1980, Graham Sutherland’s huge critical repu- tation was already in steep de- cline, his wide popularity with the general public, combined with a later career spent working increas- ingly in the South of France, not endearing him to curators and art historians who saw in that some lack of seriousness of purpose. Things have been shifting again over the last decade or so how- ever, as the real force and orig- inality of his poetic vision has be- come increasingly apparent once more and as this comparatively small but extremely choice exhibition of his landscapes at Crane Kalman, drawn from both public and private collections, makes splendidly apparent. Start- ing its life at the Abbott Hall Art Gallery, Kendal earlier this sum- mer, the show provides a succinct and extremely powerful case for why Sutherland must once more take his proper place at the centre of contemporary British Art in the immediate post-war period and above all why the work still seems relevant to the present. Sutherland understood Blake and Palmer bet- ter than anyone of his generation and from them learnt the real truth of the macroscopic in the micro- scopic, “the world in a grain of sand”, “of how an infinitely small form is reproducing in miniature the whole structure of the land- scape” (Sutherland). And that’s fractals and most of modern physics too . . . NU Van Gogh in Paris It says much for the power and enterprise of the London art market these days that one of the best museum shows of the aut- umn, ‘Van Gogh in Paris’, is taking place in a commercial gallery in Mayfair, Eykyn Maclean. As its title suggests, this landmark show focuses on those two crucial years from 1886-88 when Van Gogh came to live and work in Paris and, first meeting and working alongside those artists whose work would be pivotal to his late ecstatic flowering – Monet, Gau- guin and Toulouse-Lautrec among them – shifted away from the dark, Arcadian, rose tinted quality and moved into darker, more danger- ous territory as angst and ex- ploitation are explored with re- ference to old master paintings, the ethereal translucence of her palette replaced with richer, more complex colours. Deceptively sed- uctive, it’s timely work that con- fronts the vulnerability of ado- lescence in an often less than sympathetic world. Pip Palmer Sandra Blow Ever youthful, stylish and creative, Sandra Blow continued working almost up to her death in 2006, just a year after an exhibition at Tate Britain had marked her eightieth birthday. After training at St Martin’s and the Royal Academy Schools during the 1940s it wasn’t long before she had swapped Lon- don’s post war malaise for Rome and the radical European in- fluences of the Arte Povera move- ment and in particular Alberto Burri, who introduced her to ideas of incorporating sacking, plaster and other alternative materials into her work. Later, as her palette lightened she became a super- lative colourist playing off shapes and colours to produce the large dynamic canvases, often incorpor- ating collage, for which she is chiefly remembered. Her links with St Ives are well documented (she 11. GALLERIES OCTOBER 13 T RIPLE VISION Imges from left: L isa Wright ‘The Guilty’s Gaze on the Innocent’ at the Mall Galleries. Philip Maltman ‘Hers was a singular life’ at the Sutton Gallery S andra Blow ‘Yellow and Black Projection’ at Kings Place Gallery. G raham Sutherland ‘Study for Entrance to a Lane’ 1939 at Crane Kalman Gallery Vincent van Gogh ‘The Blute-fin Windmill’ at Eykyn Maclean. Iain Gardiner, ‘Girl in a Regent Street Window’ at Royal Miniature Society at the Mall Galleries

RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NDg4NDg=