Galleries - October 2016

Gallery is showing landscape painter David Barnes and Nick Holly, who paints South Wales with Lowryesque simplicity while showing a lightness of spirit quite unliketheSalford master. The biggest achievement in putting Welsh artists back on view this autumn is the reopening of Swansea’s Glynn Vivian Art Gallery after comprehensive five year redevelopment. It’s one of thegems among municipal galleries, particularly rich in British 20th century art with Welsh connections – Brangwyn, Gwen and Augustus John, Herman, Innes, and it represents authoritatively local masters Alfred Janes and Ceri Richards. It also has fineworks by Richard Wilson and Thomas Jones and a definitive collection of Swansea pottery. The opening exhibitions include masterpieces from the collection of Richard Glynn Vivian himself, a sculptural installation by Lindsay Seers and ten drawings by themaster of all masters, Leonardo da Vinci, loaned by the Royal Collection. A lively programme ahead includes a retrospective curated by Mel Gooding of vibrant Swansea artist Glenys Cour, who still paints energetically at 92. Also in Swansea, the university’s Taliesin centre shows Carys Evans, who took her BA in Fine Art after a teaching career, a history that tells in the sensitivity of her lucid figure paintings. Way out west in Pembrokeshire, the Late November Gallery has an intriguing selling exhibition from a private collection – Welsh masters showing hereincludethe expressive landscape painters Peter Prendergast, David Tress and Ray Howard Jones. While in Pembrokeshire, it’s worth also winding your way down to the hidden harbour of Porthgain and the Harbour Lights Gallery , seeking out The Gallery / Yr Oriel in thelovely littletown of Newport and popping into Tenby Museum to see a retrospective of five decades of remarkable magical realism by Alan Salisbury. Highlights in mid-Wales this autumn includehusband and wife team Matt and Amanda Caines’ intricate, intimate carvings and textile works at The Art Shop& Chapel in Abergavenny; the select stable of artists at the Tower Gallery in Crickhowell; and seven different historical and contemporary exhibitions this autumn make MoMa Machynlleth seem like a whole national gallery complex. Upstairs aretheimmaculately balanced painted reliefs of John Carter RA and four realist from left: Ernest Zobole ‘LandscapePainting No 7’ Kooywood Gallery John Macfarlane ‘Apron Strings’ Martin Tinney Gallery Leonardo Da Vinci ‘Recto: Expressions of fury in horses, lions and a man’ c1504-5 pen and ink, Royal Collection Trust ©Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2016 Glynn Vivian Art Gallery Charles Burton ‘LittleTrain’ MoMa David Tress ‘Dancing in Green Sunlight 1’ Late November Gallery OCTOBER 2016 WALES GALLERIES 15 ‘experience the atmosphere here while you can’