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Indepth Arts News:
"The Shape of Colour: Works by Patrick Heron"
2006-05-25 until 2006-06-17
Richard Green
London, ,
UK United Kingdom
An exhibition of twenty-eight paintings ranging in date from 1945 to 1995 by the acclaimed British artist Patrick Heron will be staged by Richard Green at in London, to Saturday 17 June 2006. The exhibition, which includes a number of works never exhibited publicly before, presents important oil paintings from the 1950s and 1960s as well as smaller gouaches from later in his career.
Patrick Heron (1920-1999) was one of the leading artists of his generation and a key figure in the development of abstract art in England in the post-war period.
Throughout his career he remained devoted to French art and was particularly influenced by Georges Braque, Henri Matisse and Pierre Bonnard, while recognising the major significance of post-war American Abstract Expressionism. Throughout his career he was obsessed by colour and light.
In 1943 Matisse's Red Studio of 1911, which had hung for many years in a smoky Soho nightclub, was exhibited at the Redfern Gallery in London and Heron wrote: "I paid endless visits to the Redfern Gallery simply in order to absorb, in every detail, the revelations of this great masterpiece. It was by far and away the most influential single painting in my entire career." As Matisse wrote in 1947: "Colour exists in itself, has its own beauty".
Even when he was still painting figurative works in 1955 Heron wrote: "It is precisely in the abstract harmony of colour and form that the profoundest human thought and feeling finds direct expression." Mel Gooding, author and friend of the artist who is contributing an essay to the exhibition catalogue, summed it up in his book Patrick Heron published in 1994: "The subject of his painting is colour, space and light".
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