TERRY SETCH Paintings 1988 - 08

About

Terry Setch's reputation as an artists' artist has remained high for over forty years. For a broader public, however, his work is rarely seen in any depth; few museums have substantial holdings of his paintings and he works away from the limelight in south Wales. This exhibition is the first opportunity in London since the show at Camden Arts Centre in 1992 to see a substantial survey of the artist's activity since 1980, the year his work made a strong impression on visitors to the Hayward Annual. It will include rarely seen work on paper and large-scale paintings in oil and encaustic on un-stretched tarpaulin including one panel from his monumental polyptych, Touch the Earth Again (1987).

A native Londoner, Setch moved to Cardiff to teach in 1964, settling in 1969 in the coastal town of Penarth. Almost immediately the beach became the major stimulus for his work; its shifting environment stimulated a desire to integrate aspects of a landscape tradition into his practice. Using sail canvas and, later, huge styrofoam boards as supports, Setch incorporated materials and detritus found on the beach into powerful compositions that articulated his complex responses to the place, often as a microcosm of the troubled state of the world, and to the physical properties of painting.

The three large tarpaulins comprising Once upon a time there was OIL (1981) were painted directly on the beach and reflect Setch's daily encouters with weather, sea and pollution. Making the eight panels of Touch the Earth Again was equally demanding; a response to the Chernobyl explosions in the Ukraine that damaged food and crops as far afield as Wales, this work also reaches further in its resonances. Issues of innocence and spoilage are contrasted in Post Sisley, the Other View (1993), a tall three-part piece on styrofoam panels which has painted images of sunbathers and children at play overlayed with beach-combed detritus wrapped in polythene that has been burnt and fused onto the underlying materials. 'He is an original', John McEwen observed, 'He updates Turner; politicises Jackson Pollock; ruralises Rauschenberg.'

The works selected trace a process of development of an artist profoundly concerned about humanity and with a pioneering approach to the use of new materials with which to explore his unique vision. This process has led to Branscombe (after the looting of the MSC Napoli), 2007, where human and man made forms dispose themselves among organic forms with startling ease and freedom, and with a beautiful harmony of colour and form.

Setch is represented in the collections of the Tate Gallery, Arts Council, British Council, V&A, National Museum of Wales and other public collections in the UK and abroad.