Exhibition

Alan Caine: 1936 - 2022

31 Mar 2023 – 30 Apr 2023

Regular hours

Friday
09:00 – 17:00
Saturday
10:00 – 17:00
Sunday
10:00 – 17:00
Monday
09:00 – 17:00
Tuesday
09:00 – 17:00
Wednesday
09:00 – 17:00
Thursday
09:00 – 17:00

Free admission

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Attenborough Arts Centre

Leicester
England, United Kingdom

Travel Information

  • Leicester Train Station
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This exhibition celebrates Alan’s artistic practice. It features several key works from the University of Leicester Art Collection, as well as loans from the artist’s estate. As Associate Director of this Centre he curated exhibitions for this balcony gallery.

About

Alan was born in the American mid-west into a presbyterian tradition. After degrees in Art and Theology from American universities he lived Paris, in London and then, in the early nineteen seventies, he moved to Leicester to teach art, for the Adult Education Department, in the basement of the Percy Gee Building.

With Eleanor Hartley, and working alongside Sir Richard Attenborough, Alan later helped conceive, fund, design and launch the Attenborough Centre for Disability and the Arts – later the Attenborough Arts Centre. It was opened by Diana, Princess of Wales in 1997.

As a teacher of art, in hands-on studio classes, he inspired many, spurring some into lifelong artistic practice, some into teaching or other arts professions, themselves. As a teacher about art, he drew on an immense knowledge of art and artists from all ages, leading regular group explorations into the galleries, museums and churches of Europe. Immensely popular with his students, he carried on teaching – both art appreciation and practical art classes – until he was almost 80 years old.

He was a dedicated practising artist for 60 years, most of those working from his upstairs studio in Queens Road. He worked in paint, in ink and pencil, and in woodcut and linocut. His subjects and themes, of course, shifted and rebounded over those years. But there are some well-trodden paths. The knots and veils that hide – and might reveal – a world beyond; the shimmers and geometries of light in landscape that prod new intuitions; the murmurations and vibrations of massed forms, both human and vegetable, that provide both visual joy and a grip on creation. His subject matter was what was right in front of him: rugs, mops, trees, leaves, dried grass, threads, knots, bundled cloth, eggs, shells and, of course, landscapes. “His is a highly spiritual yet human world of the wonder of the everyday.”

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