GROUP EXHIBITION

This exhibition features three artists whose lives spanned the twentieth century, working across different generations and geographies yet united by their distilled observations of place and the journeys that inspired them.

For Milton Avery (1885–1965), it was long, hot summers spent on America’s East Coast that were an enduring source of inspiration; for Etel Adnan (1925–2021), the memory of her childhood in Lebanon, or the fertile valleys of California, where she settled in the 1950s. Ilse D’Hollander (1968–1997) would spend hours walking and cycling the flat, agricultural land, rivers and canals of East Flanders, returning to her remote studio where she would translate the pathways she had travelled into paintings.

None of the paintings on view, which date from the 1950s to the 1990s, were made en plein air; the artists inhabited and experienced landscapes only to draw on them from memory back in the studio. In their canvases, the living landscape is translated into simplified, sometimes geometric, though always intensely charged passages of colour.

An accompanying text by Christopher Riopelle explores how landscape painting was an important route into abstraction: ‘In recent years, explanations for the spiritual origins of abstract painting have been ascendant. Yes, the aspiring soul plays a huge role here but so too does straightforward material observation. Look long enough and landscape falls into broad patterns of shape and colour. Follow the eye. Abstraction inevitably emerges.’