calendario eventi  :: 

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5/10/2007

Three Exhibitions

Tate St Ives, St Ives (Cornwall)

John Wells Centenary Display / Jonty Lees: Artist in Residence / Kenneth Martin & Mary Martin: Constructed Works

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John Wells Centenary Display

To mark the 100th year since the birth of British painter John Wells (1907 – 2000) Tate St Ives will be presenting a selection of his work from private collections and the Tate Collection.

This small display highlights some of the artistic concerns of this intensely private man. Born 27 July 1907 in London, Wells qualified as a Doctor from University College London. During a visit to Cornwall in 1928 he studied briefly with Stanhope Alexander Forbes in Newlyn and was introduced to Ben and Winifred Nicholson and Christopher Wood. He was the GP for the Scilly Isles from 1936 to 1945, when during his occasional visits to Nicholson and Hepworth in St Ives, he met Naum Gabo, who became a major and lasting influence upon him. At the end of World War Two he chose to pursue a career as a full-time artist, buying one of Forbes former studios in Newlyn. Wells employed different techniques to create works of pure abstraction, generally with suggestions of natural sources. He used the principles of the Golden Section, a structure based on ideal proportions, to achieve balance of line, mass, and colour.

Though living in Newlyn, Wells was at the centre of artistic activity in post-war St Ives. He was a founder member of the Crypt Group in 1946 and of the Penwith Society of Artists in Cornwall in 1949. Wells exhibited widely in London, Paris, Sao Paolo and New York as well as St Ives, and in 1965 he acquired a second studio in Newlyn which he shared for nearly thirty years with the sculptor Denis Mitchell.

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Jonty Lees: Artist in Residence

Working in sculpture, video and installation, Jonty Lees (b1971) is the fifth artist to emerge from the Tate St Ives Artist Residency Programme at the historic Porthmeor Studios, St Ives. Playful and inventive, his ideas may stem from a desire to employ a particular material or object – from bicycles or Blu-Tack to Bratwurst – with which he explores the eccentricities of human activity. His works, rooted in everyday life, often revisit gadgets and games of childhood memories or those poetic moments of daydream.

Living and working in Cornwall, Lees studied at University College Falmouth and the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London.

Using one of the historic Porthmeor Studios in St Ives, previously occupied by Borlase Smart, Ben Nicholson and Patrick Heron, Lees has had the opportunity to develop his professional practise with the support of Tate St Ives.

An illustrated catalogue, with an essay by Mark Godfrey accompanies the exhibition. Priced £8.95.

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Kenneth Martin & Mary Martin: Constructed Works

Constructed Works brings together two of Britain's key post-war abstract artists, Kenneth Martin (1905-1984) and Mary Martin (1907-1969). In the first joint public-gallery exhibition since 1971, the show presents a focused body of work by each artist, highlighting the correspondences and differences between their practice. Living and working together, they continually exchanged ideas, although rarely collaborated in their lifetimes.

Foremost among the generation of British artists who 'rediscovered' abstraction during the 1940s, the Martins studied painting at the Royal College of Art, where they met, and worked as designers early in their careers before producing their first abstract paintings. These experiments in abstraction quickly translated into three dimensions, taking the form of abstract relief-sculptures, mobiles and constructions.

They developed their constructions through relationships of simple, harmonic and repeated forms using mathematical progression and rules of proportion. Their interest in modern industrial materials and the possibilities of science and technology imbues their work with a sense of optimism for the future, while also acknowledging the legacy of past technologies, and the importance of the hand-made.

This touring exhibition, organised by Camden Arts Centre, London and De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill, focuses on Kenneth Martin's mobiles from the 1950s onwards and his later Chance and Order series of abstract paintings, alongside Mary Martin's elegant relief-sculptures.

A fully-illustrated catalogue has been produced which brings new perspectives to the Martins' work through specially commissioned texts by Toby Paterson, James Hugonin and writer and art historian Sam Gathercole. Priced £17.50.

Image: Mary Martin
Rotation (Multiple) Not Limited 1968
courtesy Annely Juda Fine Art, London © Estate of Mary Martin

Tate St Ives
Porthmeor Beach - St Ives (Cornwall)

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