Galleries - April 2014

and the Tate. This keenly awaited publication will feature over 100 colour illustrations of the artist’s works, many of which will be included in this exhibition of over 40 paintings, drawings and prints. Bill Hare Roman Halter At 12 the only survivor of 800 jews in the Polish town of Chodecz, Roman Halter found a uniquely expressive medium though which to come to terms with the horrors of the Holocaust that he had witnessed as a child – stained glass. Arriving in Britain in 1945 aged 18 and practising very successfully as an architect for some 30 years, he committed to a less secure career as a full- time artist in 1976. Stained glass became his key medium, its depth and balance of colour suiting his expressive purposes ideally, the lead stripping providing a resonant structure for his weighty imagery, fufilling a promise to his grandfather to bear witness. He quickly became a recognised master, working with Henry Moore for 3 years in the 80s. He produced a number of 2D works too, among them a series of minute watercolours of the English idyll of Dorset, violently intruded upon by graphic depictions and detached prose accounts of Holocaust atrocities and which are shown alongside his stained glass in this moving memorial show (he died in 2012) at Ben Uri Gallery from 11 April. its belt. Initiated as the Portscatho Society of Artists by motivating force Chris Insoll it expanded into the New Gallery in 2000 and now incorporates a big picture showroom and framing facilities. The studios are in constant use and the gallery opens three days a week to show members’ work – Felcey, Gardner, Mumford, Ward, amongst them. While Chris’s book Porthscatho illustrates the story beautifully it’s still no substitute for a visit. Pip Palmer Adrian Wiszniewski The exhibition at Edinburgh’s Open Eye Gallery (5-23 April) coincides with a new monograph (published by Sansom & Co) on the art and career of Adrian Wiszniewski by Alex Kitson, a former curator at Liverpool’s Walker Art Gallery, where they met at the time Adrian was artist- in-residence in the mid-80s, when Neo-Figuration dominated the international art scene. With his richly coloured paintings of self-absorbed figures languidly lounging on mossy banks in their own imagined personal Arcadias, this young Glaswegian painter was an immediate star of that movement with his highly stylised distinctive pictures being acquired by the likes of MOMA 12 GALLERIES APRIL 2014 smashing against his studio window, this unmissable show is a microcosm of his career and the intimacy of the medium. Interestingly, one of Hockney’s college friends, Norman Stevens, has a print show at the RA’s Tenant Gallery to 25 May, including his elegiac images of Stonehenge and colour- drenched screenprint gardens. Finally, there’s the 29th London Original Print Fair (24-27 April), also at the RA, with 50 international galleries showcasing gems such as Picasso’s lino-woodcuts and Gillian Ayres’ abstracts on Unryu-shi Japanese paper; Rabley Drawing Centre from Marlborough, Wilts, will be launching ‘Wildwood’ – a series of new linocuts by Eileen Cooper RA. Melanie Abrams Portscatho Art colonies are often transient phenomena forming around a particular location (frequently and tellingly on the coast) an individual artist and/or the communal desire to explore new ideas – then dissipating accordingly. In Cornwall Newlyn was probably the best known but it was never unique and this month we learn that Portscatho in Roseland has thirty years under from left: N orman Stevens ARA, ‘Levens Hall Garden’ 1985, screenprint © Estate of artist at the Royal Academy. A drian Wiszniewski, ‘Highland Mary’, 2011, gouache on paper, 87x143cm at Open Eye. R oman Halter after Henry Moore, ‘Reclining Figure’, stained glass and cast aluminium alloy at Ben Uri Gallery