‘Victor Pasmore was perhaps the most influential abstract artist in Britain and became one of the leading abstract painters of our time. His work can be found in many Public Collections around the world including: Tate Britain, Royal Academy of Arts - London, Museum of Modern Art - New York, The British Council, Yale Center for British Art and numerous regional British galleries.

Pasmore (1908-1998) was born in Surrey. Attended evening classes at Central School of Arts and Crafts from 1927, while working as a local government officer, and experimenting with art styles reflecting developments in art in France since the 1880s. In 1937 founded the Euston Road School with William Coldstream, Graham Bell and Claude Rogers, teaching a style of Cézannesque realism. The school closed in 1940, but this group moved on to teach at the Camberwell School of Art 1943-49, although Pasmore himself began to experiment with abstraction from 1947 onwards. Teaching at the Central School since 1949, he turned to abstract reliefs in 1952, and in the following year became Head of Painting at King’s College, Durham University, staying till 1961, when he was able to devote himself full-time to painting. In 1966 he moved to Malta, where he resided until his death, also enjoying producing graphics at an Italian workshop, in parallel with his paintings.

After experiments in lyrical abstraction in the early 1930s, and until his move towards abstraction again in the late 1940’s, for a decade his work showed a disciplined, sober form of Cézannesque realism in portraits and landscapes. His earliest new abstract experiments used linear forms and collage but soon, in parallel with the work of Kenneth and Mary Martin, became rigorously constructivist, with some works as three-dimensional wall-reliefs in wood and perspex. In the 1960s the geometry softened, introducing curved lines and edges, and bright colours, blossoming in the 70s and later into lyrical abstract compositions of points, wandering lines and planes of bright colours against his habitual white backgrounds, and even some drawn outlines of natural forms again.

After his first retrospective at the Arts Council Gallery in Cambridge (1955), he represented Britain at the 30th Venice Biennale in 1960 with an exhibition which toured to Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, Bochum, Belgrade, Oslo and Copenhagen, and represented Britain again at the 8th Sao Paulo Bienial in 1965, toured to Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Lima and Santiago, in the same year as his retrospective at the Tate Gallery. Museum and gallery exhibitions proliferated across Europe and the USA, culminating in retrospectives at the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, and the Phillips Collection, Washington DC (1988-89) and the Center for International Contemporary Arts , New York (1990) and the Serpentine Gallery, London (1991).’ www.victorpasmore.com

Contact the gallery to receive a catalogue of available artworks by Victor Pasmore

Richard Serra,

Right Angle I (2019),

Etching and hand-applied paintstik, 18 × 15 in

Framed in Oak

Private collection

Nicholson was born in Denham, Buckinghamshire, and was the son of the artists ‘William Nicholson and Mabel Pryde. He studied at the Slade School of Art, 1910-11. He spent 1912 to 1914 in France and Italy, and was in the United States in 1917-18. He married the artist Winifred Roberts in 1920. Over the next three years they spent winters in Lugano, Switzerland, then divided their time between London and Cumberland. In 1931, Nicholson's relationship with the sculptor Barbara Hepworth resulted in the breakdown of his marriage to Winifred. He and Hepworth married in 1938 and divorced in 1951. Nicholson lived in London from 1932 to 1939, making several trips to Paris in 1932-3, visiting the studios of Picasso, Braque, Arp, Brancusi and Mondrian. From 1939 to 1958 he lived and worked in Cornwall, before moving to Switzerland. He returned to London in 1974. 
  Nicholson's earliest paintings were still lifes influenced by those of his father. In the 1920s he began painting figurative and abstract works inspired by Post Impressionism and Cubism. He produced his first geometric and abstract reliefs in 1933. He first exhibited in 1919, at the Grosvenor Gallery and Grafton Galleries. His first one-man show was held at the Twenty-one Gallery, London in 1924. From 1924 to 1935 he was a member of the Seven and Five Society, and in 1933 he joined Unit One, founded by Paul Nash. In 1937 Nicholson, Naum Gabo and the architect Leslie Martin edited Circle: International Survey of Constructive Art. Circle identified Nicholson with a group of like-minded artists and architects who wanted to apply 'constructivist' principles to public and private art, advocating mathematical precision, clean lines and an absence of ornament.
    In 1952 Nicholson won first prize at the Carnegie International, Pittsburgh. He was awarded the first Guggenheim International painting prize in 1956, and the international prize for painting at the Sao Paulo Bienal in 1957. He received the Order of Merit in 1968. Numerous retrospective exhibitions of his work have been held, including shows at the Venice Biennale and Tate Gallery in 1954-5, Kunsthalle, Berne in 1961, Museum of Fine Arts, Dallas in 1964, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo in 1978, and Tate Gallery in 1993-4. Helped by wide international exposure in British Council tours during the 1940s and 1950s and by the championing of the writer Herbert Read, Nicholson's work came to be seen, with Henry Moore's, as the quintessence of British modernism.’ Court Gallery, Somerset

Please contact the gallery on gallery@richeldisfineart.com for information on available artworks by Ben Nicholson.

pic: Photograph of Ben Nicholson wearing plimsolls with his arm resting on his knee

Gordon Baldwin is one of Britain‘s most distinguished ceramic artists. Though initially trained as a painter, his subsequent career as a ceramicist spans a period of more than sixty years. Baldwin has described his approach as ‘Artist as Explorer with the vessel as my basic structure (like the structure of a Haiku)’. His distinctive works combine sculptural form with abstract painterly marks and more recent vessels employ tactile, almost sensuous, expression.

In recognition of his influential career and achievements Baldwin was awarded an OBE in 1992 and received an honorary doctorate from the Royal College of Art (London) in 2000. His work is represented in many important public collections worldwide and has been the subject of a number of major retrospectives, most recently the touring exhibition Gordon Baldwin: Objects for a Landscape, originated by York Art Gallery and selected by Tatjana Marsden. 

Please follow this link to view A Peripheral Vision II, recent drawings by Gordon Baldwin (pdf)
 

Collection is in partnership with leading ceramic/sculpture gallery Marsden Woo, London. Photography by Philip Sayer.