Beardsmore Gallery

“Happy paintings for me are pretty curious”. I have grown up watching Bob’s dedication to the labour of art, the essential interest in his life. Until recently his art has been part of the characteristically English search for the mark hard won, the artist’s progress as he carries his burden through the Slough of Despond […]

Most people in Britain who are interested in contemporary art are not aware of the strength of Concrete and Constructive Art in Germany. In general, German art for us is represented by Gerhardt Richter, Baselitz or Polke, and perhaps the newer photographers Thomas Struth or Andreas Gursky. People would be astonished to learn that there […]

‘Inside out’ is an expression we use every day – we know people ‘inside out’ (they hold no surprises), a piece of clothing is ‘inside out’ (not meant to be seen). But David’s choice of title is both literal and open to other interpretations, a way of situating the viewer in a painted interior that […]

Oliver Barratt’s still moving takes its cue from TS Eliot’s Four Quarters: Here and there does not matter We must be still and still moving. Motionless yet seemingly alive, inert yet bristling with energy, the sculptures explore the paradox at the heart of Eliot’s poem. The opposition between stillness and movement is just one of […]

When I first met Lisa Wright she had just won the prestigious Hunting Art Prize and was preparing for an exhibition in West Cornwall where she has lived for the past six years. I went to see the work in her studio at the converted chapel she shares with her painter husband and their two […]

Mark Surridge is a painter who to some extent works in a very English tradition, landscape, which is the base on which he says he is “grappling with abstract relationships between shapes, colours and textures on the picture plane.” At first glance his work looks abstract and the results have their own very personal syntax, […]