Art Noticeboard: Albert Irvin and Abstract Expressionism

Sunday, 9 December 2018

Albert Irvin and Abstract Expressionism - RWA Bristol (until 3 March 2019)

Albert Irvin, Kestrel, 1981

Albert Irvin and Abstract Expressionism is at the Royal West of England Academy until 3 March 2019.

This is a wonderful exhibition. In fact, it is four wonderful exhibitions in a perfect synthesis. The core is a glorious celebration of the life’s work of Albert Irvin – a painter whose exuberant and utterly joyful abstract paintings fill the two, beautiful, principal galleries of the RWA. Alongside this are displays which contextualise and complement the survey of Irvin’s career. The first is a 60^th anniversary commemoration of an exhibition at the Tate Gallery – New American Painting – which was the first substantial showing of the work of New York’s Abstract Expressionists in Britain and had a life changing impact on many artists, including Irvin (“Like a bomb going off”); several of the artists in that 1959 exhibition – Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Barnett Newman, Jack Tworkov, Grace Hartigan, Robert Motherwell – are included here. Then there is a display of the spikey, figurative social realist British painting of the 1950s – dubbed ‘Kitchen Sink’ painting by critic David Sylvester in 1954: Peter Coker, John Bratby, Edward Middleditch. These artists were an early influence on Irvin – evident in works such as Chicken in a Box 2 – before he absorbed the impact of Abstract Expressionism. Finally, there is a terrific display of Irvin’s peers – Gillian Ayres, Sandra Blow, Sandra Porter, and, most thrillingly to my eyes, Basil Beattie and John Hoyland.

It is a joyful exhibition, brilliantly conceived and curated by artist, RWA President and University of Gloucestershire lecturer, Stewart Geddes.

On 4 February 2019 the exhibition will be the setting for a symposium, jointly presented by the University of Gloucestershire and the RWA, 'Abstract Painting Now'.