Roger Hilton
dal 1/8/2008 al 20/9/2008
Segnalato da
1/8/2008
Roger Hilton
Kettle's Yard, Cambridge
Swinging out into the void. The exhibition comprises more than fortyfive paintings as well as drawings from public and private collections, focusing on Hilton in mid-career, at the height of his powers.
Kettle's Yard is presenting a major exhibition of the oil paintings of Roger
Hilton. This will be its only showing. The exhibition comprises more than
fortyfive paintings as well as drawings from public and private collections
across the UK and includes several paintings rarely seen or not previously
exhibited.
The exhibition focuses on Hilton in mid-career, at the height of his powers.
It concentrates on the oil paintings and drawings from 1953, when he took on
board the lessons of Mondrian, whose work he encountered that year, to 1965
when he finally left London to settle in Cornwall. The selection ranges from
the relatively austere black, red and white paintings of 1954 to the
marauding Oi Yoi Yoi and Dancing Nude of 1963 and from the tiniest canvas
to the seven foot expanse of Newlyn 1.
Roger Hilton (1911-1975) is widely thought to be one of the best and most
daring painters of his generation. His fellow painter Patrick Heron hailed
him as "destined in time to enjoy an international status as high as that of
any painter of his generation." His paintings can be as rumbustious as the
life he led. Spontaneous in gesture, they show him to be one of the boldest
yet subtlest colourists.
However abstract his paintings became, the human body was never far away. He
found "a certain tiresome emptiness about abstraction" and wanted to achieve
"a new sort of figuration, that is, one which is more true". "The technique
has been built up", he wrote in 1957, " not so much for the purposes of
representing the visual world as for being an instrument capable of
embodying man's inner truths."
Before and after the war Hilton had studied and worked in Paris and, in the
'50s and '60s, while many British painters were looking to America, he saw
himself firmly as a European artist. Looking at Mondrian he realised that
painting was not a matter of creating an illusion of space but of affecting
the space outside the picture. "It has become an instrument", Hilton
explained, "a kind of catalyst for the activation of surrounding space".
The exhibition has been selected by Michael Harrison, Director of Kettle's
Yard and Andrew Lambirth, author of a recent monograph on Roger Hilton. The
catalogue will include essays by Andrew Lambirth, painter Luke Elwes, and
German art historian Anett Hauswald.
The exhibition is being supported by John and Jennifer Talbot and the
Friends of Kettle's Yard.
Opening august 2, 2008
Kettle's Yard
Castle Street - Cambridge
Free admission