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Indepth Arts News:
"Ben Nicholson: Chasing Out Something Alive'"
2002-07-22 until 2002-09-22
Kettle's Yard Gallery
Cambridge, ,
UK United Kingdom
This summer Kettles Yard brings together two opposite but complementary
aspects of Ben Nicholsons mature work - the drawings and painted reliefs
which he made between 1950 and 1975.
The reliefs, carved in hardboard and painted, show Nicholson at his most
abstract and austere. By contrast, the drawings of landscapes , buildings
and still lifes find him at his most intimate, witty and spontaneous,
recording the journeys he made through Italy, Greece, France and Portugal,
to Yorkshire, East Anglia and the north-east coast.
By bringing together almost sixty drawings and reliefs, this exhibition
will show how both express the same artistic sensibility. They are the
poles between which Ben Nicholsons imagination ranged, from the particular
to the universal - the two-dimensional image exploring one facet of
reality, the three-dimensional object another. Together they constitute his
most assured and characteristic achievement and, with the white reliefs of
1934-39, are the works by which he wished to be judged. The period of the exhibition starts in 1950 with the breakdown of his
marriage to Barbara Hepworth. In 1958 he left St Ives and returned to the
Ticino in Switzerland, where he had spent the early years of his marriage
to Winifred Nicholson in the 1920s, now with his new wife, Felicitas
Vogler. There he would live the next thirteen years before returning alone
to England, living from 1971 to74 at Great Shelford, near Cambridge,
coinciding with the last years of Jim Ede at Kettles Yard, the home of
much of his earlier work. Eventually he returned to Hampstead.
The exhibition has been selected by Peter Khoroche, the author of a recent
book, Ben Nicholson: drawings and painted reliefs, published by Lund
Humphries. The exhibition will be accompanied by a well illustrated
catalogue with a new essay by Peter Khoroche.
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