Hugo Grenville - Lyric Pieces

About

McAllister Thomas is delighted to present their rst solo exhibition by Hugo Grenville, one of the country’s leading colourist painters. It has been 10 years since Hugo’s last solo exhibition in the UK. The title for the exhibition - ‘Lyric Pieces’ - is taken from a series of piano compositions written by Edvard Grieg which were published in a period of 10 years between 1867 and 1901.

Hugo describes the new collection of works:

“This recent collection of paintings for McAllister Thomas constitute an unashamed and joyous celebration of life, a passionate defence of beauty and domestic harmony, steeped in the English Romantic tradition. The work embraces both my signature gure and interior subjects, as well as landscapes painted out of doors, and all the paintings share my belief in the transforming power of colour and light, the revelation that behind the surface can be found a deeper resonance. Lucien Freud, comparing the work of Matisse and Picasso, said that Matisse was “concerned with the life of forms”, whereas Picasso was out to “amaze, surprise and astonish”. I stand rmly in the camp of Matisse, and strive to bring out the eternal qualities of light expressed through colour, qualities which in uence strongly the way we react emotionally, the way we read a scene.

If we pause in our busy lives, stand still and contemplate our surroundings for a minute or two we start to become aware of the forms around us, the way the light glances off surfaces and affects the solidity of objects, the way colours exist only in relation to other colours. Through the arrange- ment of shape, line, pattern and colour I try to conjure the lyrical and the dreamlike, a place at peace with itself. The still life and gure paintings do not generally represent an actual moment in time, but are rather the result of a process of re ection, recollection and reinvention, a distillation of human experience. The owers in the jug, or the nude on the bed belong not to now, but to all time, just as the abstract elements of colour and light are timeless, and connect us to both the past and the future, to the visible world, and to the invisible.”