British Art News

The latest news in Modern and Contemporary British Art.

by Alex Leith

Artist News, Exhibitor News Ramsay Fairs Artist News, Exhibitor News Ramsay Fairs

DECONSTRUCTING MARILYN | MARK LANCASTER AT THE REDFERN GALLERY

1964 was an eventful year for the Yorkshire artist Mark Lancaster. He was studying fine art, under pop-art guru Richard Hamilton, at King’s College, Newcastle. In his summer break, he went to New York, where he wangled a job assisting Andy Warhol in the first incarnation of The Factory, on East 87th Street. How? Here’s a lesson: he found his number in the phone book, and rang him up.

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Exhibition, Artist News Ramsay Fairs Exhibition, Artist News Ramsay Fairs

DAVID STOREY | MEMORY MAN

The oil painter David Storey brings forgotten people’s memories to life, and makes them universal.

He trawls car boot sales and flea markets for old family photo albums, and uses selected images - often of individuals or family groups posing rather awkwardly for a loved-one’s holiday snap - as the starting point of his process. He works these images into miniature portraits, using egg tempera and oil on wood, attempting to ‘unlock the poetry from within’.

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RB KITAJ | DOMINIE AT SAN FELÍU, 1978

RJ Kitaj was taught drawing by Percy Horton, who was taught by Walter Sickert, who was taught by Edgar Degas. Is it fanciful to see the connection between the French master and the American artist?

Kitaj, who spent his formative years in England, had a big influence on British pop art, and never stopped experimenting with style, form and medium, but he was, above all, an exceptional draftsman: the critic Robert Hughes called him ‘better than almost anyone else’.

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Artist News Ramsay Fairs Artist News Ramsay Fairs

RIP PHYLLIDA BARLOW | MONUMENTAL SCULPTOR

For four decades the artist Phyllida Barlow, who died this week aged 78, dedicated her life to teaching her students at the Slade School of Art. She was, by all accounts, a brilliant teacher. Some of those students made a big name for themselves: Rachel Whiteread, for example. Tacita Dean. Douglas Gordon. Ángela De La Cruz. All this time she was making her own work, quietly, in her studio.

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HALIMA CASSELL: FROM THE EARTH | WATTS GALLERY ARTISTS’ VILLAGE

Sculptural ceramicist Halima Cassell admits she had never heard of the Watts Gallery Artists’ Village, near Guildford in Surrey, before she was invited to become the first contemporary artist to exhibit there since its restoration in 2011. But as soon as she entered the Watts Cemetery Chapel, she fell in love with the eclectically styled terracotta building, realising that the artistic vision of Mary Watts, who oversaw its exterior and interior design 125 years ago, bore uncanny similarities to her own.

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Artist News, Exhibition Ramsay Fairs Artist News, Exhibition Ramsay Fairs

PIPER GOES POP

John Piper was an artistic polymath, able to shift, seemingly effortlessly, from style to style, genre to genre, medium to medium. He is perhaps most famous today for his delicate, elegant, rather brooding landscapes, particularly those depicting the ruins of churches in the English countryside. But he also worked in the fields of abstract art, collage, book illustration…

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Artist News, Exhibition Ramsay Fairs Artist News, Exhibition Ramsay Fairs

TOWNER 100 | LET GOD WAIT…

The news last summer that the 2023 Turner Prize had been awarded to Towner Eastbourne was met with surprise in certain quarters. Eastbourne? The Turner Prize? The Sussex seaside town was best known to the greater public, after all, as a genteel resort favoured by the older generation, and nicknamed ‘God’s Waiting Room’.

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