TERRY SETCH : Exhibition and Book Launch

About

This April Lund Humphries present Terry Setch by Martin Holman, the first full-scale survey of the art and life of a British painter recognised internationally as one of the most consistently radical artists of his generation. The book will be launched at Art Space Gallery on 23rd April 2009 to coincide with the opening of Terry Setch: In his own time, a highly focused exhibition of rarely seen small wax paintings and works on paper.

Setch first came to prominence in 1964 as a member of the short-lived 'Leicester Group', a loose collective of painters and sculptors whose work explored alternative ways of working to the traditional methods found in British art education.

Setch's large paintings in oil and encaustic made on unstretched sailcloth, which he made from the early 1970s, allegorised a threat to the well-being of man and nature from pollution and war, and from the threat of nuclear catastrophe. Setch has never ceased to experiment with new materials: this experimentation has embraced constructing three-dimensional objects, the incorporation of found materials and detritus, mixing paints in unorthodox combinations of synthetic wax, using Styrofoam and polypropylene sheets as supports, and introducing plastics, chalk dust, heat and corrosive fluids to a very tactile process.

In conjunction with his large works Setch has continuously made small intimate paintings of outstanding quality that explore the same themes and Art Space Gallery, by dedicating this exhibition to showing these works alongside the book, offers the widest possible understanding of Terry Setch's place in British art.

Holman's text places Setch's art in the context of the work of his contemporaries (Michael Sandle, Patrick Caulfield, Julian Schnabel), the times in which the paintings were made and exhibited, and Setch's dialogue with Modernism, international art and history.