Regent’s Park doesn’t hurt! –
has been to the mutual benefit
of bothit would seem. Now in its
third year, the extent and quality
continues to grow too, the 120+
international galleries often
putting on solo shows of work of
museum standard – the curated
Spotlight section is specially
aimed at focussing on gallery
presentations of individual artists
working in some 14 territories
across the 20th C. Be advised
though, it is absolutely huge, so
allow a day . . .
In Here Out There
I have to say I am a sucker for
looking at art in non-art gallery
type spaces, so the thought of
viewing some good
contemporary sculpture in the
incomparable architectural
surroundings of Canterbury
Cathedral’s Chapter House has
me looking up train times.
Entitled ‘In Here Out There’ –
“to reflect the journey taken for
a concept to become realised
in the material world of
sculpture” – and organised
by Ben Kidger, a sculptor and
teacher at the city’s well
regarded art school, Canterbury
College, it brings together a
whole range of artists with
artistic/academic associations
withthe city. Working in all sorts
of ways and withvery diverse
concerns, the meeting of old
and new it represents looks
irresistible.
OCTOBER 2014 GALLERIES
11
ambitious figure paintings of the
80s and lyrical landscape-based
work of the 90s, to the abstracts
that marked much of his work for
the last decade or so – but one
that may also, perhaps, account
for the critical (and curatorial)
roller-coaster his work seems to
have encountered over the same
time. The British tend to like their
artists to find a readily
recognisable style and stick with
it – Hodgkin, Freud etc – and
view withsuspicion anyone who
changes things around from time
to time as somehow not serious
and intellectually flighty, eg
Sidney Nolan. Hence no London
full retrospective is being
planned that I’m aware of despite
the fact that he was Keeper of the
RA Schools for six years and a
member for some 14 and, much
more than that, a painter of the
most genuine lifelong integrity
and originalty. How interesting
and deserved that would be.
Private Treasures
Last month’s piece on Peter
Cotterell’s
Wenlock Gallery
reminded me that we have
excellent dealers listing in these
pages showing year on year the
most tremendous groups of
Modern Britishand Post-War
painting and sculpture but,
because the focus of our limited
15th Birthday
It seems like only last year that it
started up in Battersea Park, so it
was with some astonishment that
I see that the Affordable Art Fair
is now celebrating its fifteenth
bithday. With all its offspring not
just in this country but worldwide,
it has been the most remarkably
rapid rise to fame and fortune,
one that appears to show no signs
of faltering, according to the facts
and figures for this latest edition,
a full house of galleries and all
the usual talks and events.
Maurice Cockrill
Having previewed his last show
of small NorthWales-based
landscapes at
Fynn y Parc
on
these pages in May 2013 I was
shocked at the news of his death,
aged 77, a few months later, in
December last year. He had
seemed to be right on his very
best form in these works, the
return to a landscape he had
known since a student at
Wrexham Art School in the early
60s inspiring painting of real fire
and authority. I’m delighted to be
able to report now however that a
gallery witha good reputation for
dealing in post-war British
painting,
Waterhouse & Dodd,
have taken on his estate and, to
mark the occasion, are mounting
a small ‘retrospective‘ – some 30
paintings – one that looks right
back over his career. It is a rich
and complex journey – moving
from early realism via the
Red Saunders
‘Cuffay and the London
Chartist 1848’ at The Cynthia Corbett Gallery
M
aurice Cockrill
‘Yield’ at Waterhouse & Dodd
Keith Vaughan ‘Bathers at Highgate II’ 1955
(detail) at Anthony Hepworth Fine Art
