Peter Clossick: Spirit & Matter

About

Peter CLOSSICK: SPIRIT & MATTER

27 April – 1 June 2017

Drinks and meet the artist: Thursday 11 May, 6.30-8.30pm

Felix & Spear Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of paintings spanning the career of the former London Group president and NEAC member, Peter Clossick.

"Drawing is the key factor in my practise of working from direct observation. Not as cartoon or photo dependent cliché but reacting with material on the surface to give physical presence. It is accumulated experience through time. All images made from life are based on the abstract of lines, marks and area, which are my language limitations in front of the model or motif. The task is to try and match them to my experience at that moment. Moments which are in a constant state of change where nothing has ever been static or fixed but in perpetual motion. It is my adventure to try and go beyond knowing with no pre-determined outcome, using paint, charcoal, ink and pigment stick as matter - channelled through my body and mind in perseverance for a creative act outside of limitations, becoming a form of metaphoric reality."                    Peter Clossick 2017

Peter Clossick focuses on faces, the single figure, men and women, the nature of physical sensuousness itself. The models are still, seated or lying; their eyes cast down or even blanked out, while the composition is enlivened by the physical act of perception. His is the moving and heuristic gaze, the act of discovering of the world through the exploration of possibilities…. He makes us feel the present, the here and now of our being in the world, the joy and the anguish of life in moments of heightened sensation. This is never a simple description of the outer skin of things, but rather a multi-layered, multi-toned articulation of physical realities…. Walter Sickert’s gritty, sensual Camden Town nudes spring to mind, but now they are transmuted into an intensely private and philosophical mood. Clossick grew up overlooking Mornington Crescent and is steeped in the “Bombstream” (Bomberg + Coldstream), Euston Road tradition. Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff’s thick wielding of paint in scenes of London provides a continuity from the 1960s right up to the present. Clossick builds on these predecessors, fixing as they do, that peculiarly luminous grey London light, and their notion of painting as a relief – as sculpture – as a lump of matter. It becomes a tactile, structural and eventually abstract object which can hold, to borrow David Bomberg’s words, “the spirit in the mass”.... Here is a love affair with the human form and the physical properties of paint on canvas. The marks, swirls, touches, impastos, scumbles, draw us in. We can, in a moment of extraordinary awareness, be transported out of ourselves. Of course, this is why art touches us and can even mesmerise us. We can share and explore another’s world and return to our own, secure in the knowledge that the journey has enriched our view of things.                 Corinna Lotz 2016 (excerpts from the essay ‘Peter Clossick’s moving gaze’)

ABOUT PETER CLOSSICK, PPLG NEAC

Peter Clossick studied at Camberwell School of Art and Goldsmiths College during the early 1970s and has been engaged in professional fine art practice since. He is a member and Past President of The London Group and a member of The New English Art Club under the Federation of British Artists and exhibits regularly at the Mall Galleries, showing widely both here and abroad. He has three times been awarded a prize in the Lynn Painter-Stainers competition, work has been included in the Ruth Borchard and other public collections and he was shortlisted with a prize for the 2016 Columbia Threadneedle competition. Clossick has exhibited in the John Moores; R.C.A; Deutsche Bank; Arti et Amicitiae; Art Miami; Whitechapel Open; South London Gallery; Camden Arts Centre; Festival Hall and RA Summer Shows. Previous to Fine Art training, he studied Shoe Design at Leicester Polytechnic and won a Royal Society of Arts Bursary and the Lanctan Cup for design.