Modern British Prints/Barry Stedman Ceramics

About

To celebrate the New Year in, Bircham Gallery are delighted to be showing Graphic Works by a group of highly acclaimed artists to include:

Sir Terry Frost RA (1915-2003) was one of Britain’s most respected and successful abstract artists, his work spanning over six decades. 

Printmaking always played a key role in Terry’s work: for him painting and printing were inseparable, with one medium creating ideas for the other.

Sir Peter Blake "the godfather of British Pop art", notoriously famous for that album cover…His works scans over five decades making him one of the leading exponents of the British Pop Art Movement.

Barbara Rae RA whose abstract works use strong colours and composition. She has exhibited internationally and her work can be found in public and private collections around the world.

Bruce McLean is one of the major figures of contemporary British Art. Born in 1944 Bruce’s bold and confident approach to print making and the wit evident therein proved influential to his contemporaries and also to a generation of younger artists.

Sandra Blow RA (1925-2006) studied at St. Martin’s (1941-6) and then the Royal Academy School’s, before leaving for Italy, where she met and was hugely influenced by Alberto Burri. Burri introduced Sandra to the potentials of collage and the tensions between textures therein. Her association with her mentor underpinned Sandra’s work throughout her life though she distilled her own form of reductive abstract expressionism, preoccupied with space, matter and movement.

 Complimenting the graphic works is ceramicist Barry Stedman who works with red earthenware clay and is usually wheel thrown and altered or constructed from soft slabs and then painted with coloured slips, stains and oxides.

Paintings in watercolour or gouache, often made in the open air, helps to inform his ideas often influenced by the light and patterns in the sky and the farms and fields visible from his home.

Barry works intuitively and energetically and, because the true colours of the pieces only emerge after firing, there is always an element of chance in his work, which retains its spontaneity and freshness