Overview
Albert Irvin OBE RA HRWA (1922-2015)
Albert Irvin was a prolific British artist, best known for his exuberant paintings, watercolours, screenprints and gouaches. He was born in London in 1922 and, apart from brief periods during WWII, continued to live and work there throughout his life. His art focusses on capturing and exploring the experience of being in the world.
After the war Irvin returned to his passion for art, enrolling at Goldsmiths College in 1946. He graduated four years later with a National Diploma in Design. Irvin returned to Goldsmiths in 1962 as a teacher and remained there for a further twenty years. He continued painting and printmaking until he died on 26th March 2015, aged 92 in St George’s Hospital, London.
In 1986 Irvin participated in Artist of the Day, a landmark programme started by Angela and Matthew Flowers in 1983. The fast-paced, revolving two-week exhibition features 10 UKbased artists, each presenting a one-day solo exhibition at Flowers Gallery, supported by their artist selector.
BERNARD COHEN (b 1933)
Born in London, where he lives and works, Bernard Cohen studied at the Slade School of Fine Art from 1951-1954. In 1988 he was appointed as Slade Professor and Director of the Slade School of Fine Art, University College, London. Cohen's work came to prominence during the 1960s and has since been exhibited extensively.
Public exhibitions include a retrospective at the Hayward Gallery, London in 1972, which toured to Newcastle and Leeds; Artist in Focus, Six Paintings from the Tate Gallery Collection, Tate, London in 1995; Stroll on! Aspects of British Abstract Art in the Sixties, Mamco, Musée d'Art Moderne et Contemporain, Geneva in 2006; and Abstraction and the Human Figure at CAM's British Art Collection, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon in 2010. In 2017 Cohen's work was exhibited as a Spotlight exhibition at Tate Britain, with a supporting film It's A Matter of Dancing With Chaos here.. (This link opens in a new tab). In 2018 Cohen featured in Post-Pop at the Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon and in Kaleidoscope at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool.
Bernard Cohen's work is held in numerous public collections including the British Council, Tate, the Victoria & Albert Museum, and MoMA.
RICHARD SMITH, CBE (1931–2016)
Richard Smith was one of the most influential artists of his generation. After studying in the 1950s at the Royal College of Art alongside artists such as Peter Blake and Robyn Denny, Smith stood apart from the burgeoning Pop Art movement of the 1960s by melding the slick and vibrant imagery found in the commercial landscape with an expansive abstract painting language very much his own. He gained critical acclaim for extending the boundaries of painting into three dimensions, creating sculptural shaped canvases with monumental presence, which literally protruded into the space of the gallery.
Born in Hertfordshire in 1931, Richard Smith was awarded the prestigious Harkness Fellowship in 1959 which facilitated his move to New York, where he had his first solo show at Green Gallery. While still in his thirties Smith had a 1966 retrospective at the Whitechapel Gallery and participated in some of the most important exhibitions of his time, such as Place at the ICA in 1959; Situation at RBA Galleries in 1960; and Painting and Sculpture of a Decade at Tate in 1964. After being awarded the Grand Prize at the 9th São Paulo Biennial in 1967 and participating in Documenta IV, Kassel in 1968, Smith represented Britain at the 1970 Venice Biennale and was awarded the CBE in 1971. Seven Exhibitions 1961-75, a major retrospective, was held at Tate in 1975.
Smith's work is extensively held in public collections including the Arts Council England; The British Museum, London; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate, London; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; MIT, Boston; and Philadelphia Museum of Art.
PATRICK HUGHES (b 1939)
First exhibiting with Angela Flowers in 1970, Hughes’ painted reliefs constantly baffle his audience, demonstrating how deceptive appearances can be. As we walk towards the seemingly flat paintings they loom out at us, creating a disorientating, ‘moving’ experience. The preconceived assumptions of eye and brain are challenged, inevitably raising important questions about our perception and the subconscious.
His witty illusions are not meant to confuse us (although they do), but aim to clarify our relation to reality. Instead of describing paradox, we can now experience it interactively; for his work is more to do with us, the way we think and the way we perceive.
Hughes’ work is included in major public collections such as Tate, Victoria & Albert Museum and the British Council.
