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14/3/2003

Two exhibitions

Pallant House Gallery, Chichester

Graham Sutherland: A Life in Focus
15 March - 11 May 2003

Graham Sutherland is widely acknowledged to be one of the greatest British artists of the 20th century. The exhibition of his work at Pallant House Gallery marks the Centenary of his birth in 1903, presenting some of the finest works from all periods of his artistic career. Pallant House Gallery is fortunate to possess a very important collection of Sutherland's work which was assembled by Walter Hussey, who as Canon of St Matthews, Northampton and Dean of Chichester Cathedral commissioned a number of significant works and became a close friend of the artist.

Graham Sutherland: A Life in Focus includes key examples of Sutherland's earliest poetic etchings and watercolours of rural England with which he first made his reputation as an artist. The exhibition also includes his semi-abstract compositions, such as the ominous pre-war Entrance to a Lane (1939) which evokes what he called the 'exultant strangeness' of the Pembrokeshire landscape, and the striking images of bomb damage and scarred landscapes that he produced while serving as an Official War Artist from 1940-45.

In the aftermath of WWII Sutherland produced the powerful Crucifixion (1947) and remarkable images inspired by the notion of the crown of thorns such as Thorn Head (1947) which captures the angst of the post-war period. The landscapes painted in the South of France have a less troubled spirit, with brilliant colours and a preoccupation with Mediterranean motifs as in Landscape in the South of France (1950).

Alien Nation: Immigrant Artists in Britain
15 March - 10 August 2003

Many artists came to Great Britain between 1933 and 1945 to escape persecution from Nazism. Despite the dislocation of exile and emigration these individuals were able to make an important and lasting contribution to British art and culture. At a time when there is increasing discussion in some sections the media about a 'refugee crisis' in contemporary Britain this exhibition celebrates the creative contribution made by immigrant artists earlier in the century, focusing on twelve émigrés.

Alien Nation includes the remarkable image of the Huyton Camp produced by Walter Nessler during his internment in WWII and Das Hitler ABC ('the Hitler ABC'), each letter of which lampooned Hitler's characteristics. It will include paintings by Oscar Kokoschka and Hans Feibusch, artists who had been included in the Degenerate Art Exhibition in Munich in1937, and ceramics by Hans Coper and Lucie Rie, as well as works by other artists that came to Britain as refugees.

The exhibition also includes important works from the collection by artists who are now embraced as the 'British masters', such as Lucian Freud, who came to London from Berlin with his family in 1933, and Frank Auerbach, who was sent by his parents who perished in the Holocaust in 1939. The poet Stephen Spender characterised the figures in his paintings as 'people who seem burdened with perhaps terrible experience like refugees of concentration camps

Alien Nation: Immigrant Artists in Britain forms a celebration of the history of diversity in Britain, marking decibel ('Year of Cultural Diversity'), and of the individual artists who made such a contribution to British culture.

THE ARTISTS:
Frank Auerbach
Val Biro
Hans Coper
Hans Feibusch
Gerhardt Frankl
Lucian Freud
Henryk Gotlib
Joseph Herman
Oscar Kokoschka
Walter Nessler
Lucie Rie
Michael Werner

Image: Graham Sutherland, Landscape Study of Cairns, 1944, Drawing

Pallant House Gallery
9 North Pallant, Chichester, West Sussex PO19 1TJ
Opening times
Tuesday to Saturday 10.00am to 5.00pm
Sundays and Bank Holidays 12.30pm to 5.00pm

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