Osborne Samuel, a
partnership between two
established figures, Peter
Osborne and Gordon Samuel, is,
on the other hand, very much the
archetypal West End gallery, its
handsome Bruton Street space
on two floors putting on shows
by major Modern British
(currently the superb Lynn
Chadwick show reviewed here
last month) and Contemporary
artists. Whatever the differences
between them though, together
they form a vital part of the
dynamic professionalism that
helps make London such an
absorbing and varied place to
look at, and buy, art.
Mountains on the Mind
By coincidence two exhibitions
this month from artists in their
80s for whom the Welsh
landscape, the mountains in
particular, has always been of
paramount importance – Glyn
Morgan at
Chappel Galleries
and
Malcolm Edwards at
Ffin y Parc
.
After that though the stories
begin to diverge significantly.
Morgan, now 88, left Wales as a
young student, invited by Cedric
Morris, selecting works at an
exhibition in Cardiff in 1943, to
come and study at the art school
he and Lett Haines ran in Essex.
Morgan ended up staying there
38 years, being the last to leave
after they both died. For all that
he was on the other side of the
country though, the memory of
the Welsh landscape remained
the core theme of the work, the
love of colour he learned from
Morris providing the means for
infusing that memory with its
unmistakably visionary,
mythological and ecstatic
character. This is not, it should be
added, a retrospective show – he
had that at the National Library of
Wales in 2006 – but one that
looks at his landscapes of the
last 10 years, right up to the
present. Revelatory stuff.
Malcolm Edwards, by way of
contrast, has stayed put in North
Wales, painting his technically
astonishing watercolours, full of
an almost hallucinatory realism,
surrounded by his beloved
mountains of Snowdonia for over
30 years (he was an architect
before that). That said, his art
remains, as with Glyn Morgan,
very much a question of memory
and imagination, the work being
produced entirely in the studio
from sketches. Mood and drama
are pre-eminent in his work but
they are never allowed to run riot,
truth to the reality of this often
harsh and forbidding landscape
providing a vital and moving
check. He claims this is going to
be his last major one man show,
but on the evidence of this still
powerfully focused work, one is
forced to ask why?
changes afoot in the St
James’s/Mayfair gallery scene, it
would appear that, generally
speaking, 19th and Early 20th C.
dealers such as Stoppenbach
and Delestre are moving south of
Piccadilly, late 20th C., Modern
British and Contemporary are
shifting northwards, just above or
below Oxford Street, leaving the
bit in the middle increasingly to
the fashion business . . .
1 0 x 2
Two London-based galleries with
very different artistic strategies
are celebrating their 10th
anniversaries this summer –
Cynthia Corbett
and
Osborne
Samuel
. The former operates
effectively as a ‘pop up’ gallery,
its American-born director either
hiring spaces, as with her
anniversary show at the Gallery
in Cork Street (23 to 28 June),
collaborating with other partner
galleries, as with her not-for-profit
‘Young Masters Art Prize’ shows,
or putting on exhibitions of
individual, younger generation
artists she represents, both in the
UK and USA. It is all done with a
huge energy, two or three such
projects going on somewhere at
any particular moment. The
birthday show itself will consist of
a selection of artists from the five
‘Young Masters’ exhibitions to
date, plus groups of work from
some of her represented artists –
Tom Leighton, Deborah
Azzopardi, Andy Barber, Klari
Reiss and Lluis Barba.
JUNE 2014GALLERIES
11
from top left: P
etter Cattrell ‘Line of Trees,
Thiepval, Somme’ at the Fleming Collection
Glyn Morgan ‘Song of the Earth’ at Chappel
Galleries. Malcolm Edwards ‘Pecking Order’ at
Ffin y Parc. C
laude
Venard ‘Femme Avec Coupe
de Fruit’ at Hanina Fine Art. Lottie Davies ‘The Blue
Bedroom’ at Gallery in Cork St/Cynthia Corbett
