British Art News

The latest news in Modern and Contemporary British Art.

by Alex Leith

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Straddling form and function | The increasing collectability of ceramic art

‘Potty for it!’ gushed an Elle Magazine headline in October 2022, describing ‘the new wave of ceramics that have reached cult status’. And the jaunty pot puns didn’t stop there: ‘as designers blur the lines between art and function,’ continued the fashion mag’s on-form sub-editor, ‘it seems everyone’s got the hots for pots.’

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PIVOTAL: Digitalism

Filmmaker and ‘digitalist’ Rebekah Tolley-Georgiou is curating a cutting-edge digital art exhibition for British Art Fair at Saatchi Gallery. Here she explains to Alex Leith how advances in technology have given the art world its latest ‘ism’.

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Twisted Sinews | The art of trees

The British public’s horrified reaction to the sickening criminal felling last autumn of one of Britain’s best-loved natural landmarks – the famous sycamore near Once Brewed on Hadrian’s Wall – is testament to the country’s deep-seated love of trees.

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Deconstructing the mugs | The Shape of Things: Still Life in Britain at Pallant House

The founding President of the Royal Academy Joshua Reynolds dismissed still life painting as a minor genre, lower in the pecking order than historical paintings, landscapes and portraits. And to a certain extent, this stigma still lingers. It’s just something landscape painters do to fill the time when it’s raining, right?

Wrong.

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A queer arrangement

The second major show at Charleston’s new gallery in Lewes, Dorothy Hepworth and Patricia Preece, an Untold Story, raises more questions than it answers.

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Season’s greetings | Euan Uglow Christmas card at Austin/Desmond

Every December, until his death in 2000, the London-based artist, Euan Uglow, would think up a new design, and hand-produce around 300 cards to send out to friends and family.

This Uglow card is among a collection on show at Austin/Desmond’s viewing room until January 12, alongside works designed by David Jones, Alexander Mackenzie, Dennis Mitchell, Edward Wadsworth, CRW Nevinson, Mary Martin and Viola Paterson.

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Under that vast Hebridean sky | Frances Macdonald at Portland Gallery

Iona, in the Western Isles of Scotland, has long attracted artists, keen to interpret the ever-shifting visual interplay between sea, sky and shoreline.

To that list you can add contemporary oil painter Frances Macdonald, currently enjoying a solo show – largely featuring oil paintings of Iona – at Portland Gallery, on Bennet St, St James

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Sit! | Pluto, by Lucian Freud, at Browse and Darby

One of the great loves of Lucian Freud’s life was his dog Pluto, a whippet who he named after the Greek God of the Underworld.

Pluto was present in Freud’s studio from 1988 to her death in 2003, his most prolific period, and was frequently painted by the artist, with and without human companions.

You can see Freud’s 1988 etching of Pluto in the current exhibition at London gallery Browse & Darby, until January 24.

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Charming wonkiness | Lucy Harwood, at Firstsite, Colchester

In 1920, 27-year-old Slade School graduate Lucy Harwood had an emergency appendix operation on the kitchen table of the house she lived in. 3 days later, it was discovered she was paralysed down her right side, and had lost the use of the right hand she painted with. But she was determined not to give up painting.

Lucy Harwood: Bold Impressions, which runs until April 14, is the third in an ongoing series at Firstsite exploring the careers of Benton End artists.

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Magical ruralism | Sean Jefferson at David Messum Fine Art

Sean Jefferson: The Twelve Days of Christmas and Other Works runs at David Messum Fine Art, St James until December 22.

Each painting demands a careful reading, though few viewers will be able to decipher all the folkloric and spiritual symbols. It’s a feast of fairies, sprites, jesters, druids, winged dogs, ominous ravens, runic symbols, gnarly trees, medicinal herbs and slivers of moon in yellow skies.

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Manet, meet Mondrian | Hurvin Anderson at Hastings Contemporary

In 2006, the painter Hurvin Anderson accompanied his father to his regular barbershop, situated in a converted attic in the centre of Birmingham.

It was a Jamaican barbershop, which made the father – a Windrush immigrant – feel at home, as it was designed to do, painted in bright colours, the walls covered with posters of iconic black figures and newspaper cuttings: a very Caribbean clutter.

Hurvin Anderson: Salon Paintings runs at Hastings Contemporary until March 3.

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Cosmic point | Li Yuan-chia, at Kettle’s Yard

In 1970 the Chinese experimental artist Li Yuan-Chi moved from London to the village of Banks, in Cumbria, just north of Hadrian’s Wall. His motive? To single-handedly convert a derelict farmhouse into an art centre, turning cowsheds into galleries.

Kettle’s Yard, in Cambridge, are running the exhibition Making New Worlds: Li Yuan-Chi and Friends, from November 11 to February 18, marking the profound impact the artist’s idiosyncratic Cumbrian venture had on 20th-century British art.

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Disguised as doodlings | David Spiller at the Portland Gallery

A work by David Spiller is instantly recognisable. Influenced by Picasso and Dubuffet, as much as Disney and Warhol, his canvases, stitched together by hand, display a smorgasbord of competing styles and techniques. They are usually dominated by a representation of a cartoon character.

Spiller’s estate is represented in the UK by Portland Gallery on Bennet St, St James, which is, from November 8 – December 1, showing the last of a trilogy of exhibitions of his work, this one dedicated to his output between 2010 and his death in 2018.

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Moving into another intensity | Anthony Eyton at Browse and Darby

2023 has been an eventful year for the painter Anthony Eyton. In May he celebrated his 100th birthday. In June he was awarded an OBE in King Charles’ first Birthday Honours, and was featured in an exhibition of portraits at Michael Richardson’s Art Space Gallery, alongside Arturo di Stefano. And in September he enjoyed the opening of a retrospective of his work at Browse and Darby. The show continues until November 10.

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Dancing men, prancing goats | John Craxton at Pallant House Gallery

The lifelong rejection of authority and convention that shaped John Craxton’s life can be in large part explained by his childhood connection with West Sussex, and, in particular, with the city of Chichester, where he was sent to board at a choir school, aged 11.

Now he’s back. A posthumous retrospective of Craxton’s six-decade career, A Modern Odyssey, curated by his biographer Ian Collins, opens at Pallant House in Chichester this weekend.

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Teenage Raphael | Clara Klinghoffer at Crossing Borders

It’s 1915, and the painter Bernard Meninsky, life drawing tutor at London’s Central School of Arts + Crafts, has been charged with looking through the portfolio of a fifteen-year-old girl, Clara Klinghoffer. A task which, one would imagine, he was expecting to be humdrum, turned out to be anything but. “Good Lord,” he stated. “That child draws like da Vinci.” 

Klinghoffer’s 1923 painting Bananas, of an East End peddler, is included in the exhibition Crossing Borders: Internationalism in Modern British Art, at British Art Fair 2023.

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