Search results for ""Author David Anfam""

First published to accompany the exhibition, John Golding: Pure Colour Sensation at Piano Nobile gallery, this fully colour illustrated catalogue showcases fifteen years of exceptional paintings by John Golding. Although an acclaimed art historian, Golding considered himself, first and foremost, a painter. His work features in prominent institutions such as the Tate, MoMA, the Scottish National Gallery, the British Council, and the Yale Center for British Art. Golding had numerous one-man shows in the UK and abroad, and also participated in many group exhibitions, including international shows with his close friend Bridget Riley. He was appointed a CBE in 1992 and elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1994. The publication presents a survey of works from the 1970s and 1980s, ranging from large scale canvases to both small and large pastels. Golding's work, although abstract, repeatedly returns to the human body. The monumental canvases and the tactile handling of paint through expressive layering of pigment demand a visceral physical reaction from the viewer. Speaking in an interview for Artists' Lives, Golding recollected that his turn to abstraction was in "recognition of what was happening in America in the 1950s…the most important thing going on in painting [of the day]". In his abstract paintings, both intimate and large in scale, Golding sought unadulterated formal brilliance, letting colour and composition take prominence, "so that there is nothing getting between you and the pure colour sensation." Dr David Anfam's introductory essay explores the roots of Golding's abstract work in the early figurative painting he produced whilst living in Mexico. Analysing the influence of the great Mexican muralists during Golding's formative years, Anfam charts the progression of Golding's vision that culminated in the exceptionally accomplished and joyful body of the work produced in the 1970s and 1980s and reproduced in this publication.

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In the decade before his death in 2011, John Hoyland began to reckon with mortality. Confronting his own demise, he painted elegies to departed artist friends and tributes to illustrious artistic forebears. Imagery of the void looms large, but it is a void faced with defiance and vitality, less a rumination on the end than a celebration of life. This publication explores the paintings Hoyland made in this decade, including his final series, the Mysteries. Essays by Natalie Adamson, David Anfam, Matthew Collings and Mel Gooding offer a rich and multifaceted account of a complex body of work. Hoyland’s veneration of Vincent van Gogh, his connections to J.M.W. Turner, the use of black as a colour, his deployment of risk and attempts to subvert his own taste, and his development of the cosmic visual language of the Abstract Expressionists are all discussed. Richly illustrated, the book extends our understanding of Hoyland’s late work within the story of modern painting as a whole.

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The first publication dedicated exclusively to Mark Rothko’s art during the critical formative period of the 1940s. Examining the development and artistic exploration of one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century, this unprecedented volume presents the works of American artist Mark Rothko from the 1940s, a time when his most essential development as a painter occurred, dramatically and in a very compact space of time. During this period, Rothko moved from expressive figurative and surrealist canvases to more abstract multiform subjects and finally to his signature abstractions—luminous rectangles of color suspended in space. Richly illustrated with works by Rothko and his contemporaries, introduction by Todd Herman and essays by prominent Rothko scholars, this important new book deepens our understanding of Rothko’s art during this vital period, and that of the mature works that emerged from it.

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During the early 1950s, Richard Pousette-Dart (1916-1992) created one of the most anomalous bodies of work of his career: graphite drawings on undercoats of blue or ocher painted over a titanium white ground. For an artist known for his love of color and impasto, these predominantly white paintings constituted quite a departure. Twenty-five works were shown at Betty Parsons Gallery in 1955, in an exhibition titled Predominantly White; the artist returned to mine this vein in later paintings in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s.

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