Roy Oxlade: Work From the 80s & 90s

About

This is the first solo exhibition of Oxlade's work since his death in February 2014 aged 85. The paintings shown were all made in the 1980s and 1990s and expand our understanding of the themes and metaphors which are central to Oxlade's practice along with his use of bold colour and improvised image. His home and studio in Kent formed the basis of his subject matter, with anglepoise lamps, lemon squeezers and his wife Rose Wylie as some of the recurring themes. As Roy Oxlade stated a year before he died:

 'Painting to me is like a room of the imagination. It's up to me what I do with it. I choose its size and its materials - usually canvas and oil paint. At the beginning its relationships don't amount to much - it's a rectangle in a jumble of art history I relate to […] There would not be much fun in leaving the room empty […] I have put in some other stuff, some characters, some actors - tables, pots, colours, easels, lamps, scribbles, figures and faces to interact with each other. I adjust the temperature, open the windows, shut the windows, throw things out, change the lighting.'

Roy Oxlade emerged in the 1950s as one of a prominent group of London-based painters which also included Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff. Taught by David Bomberg, Oxlade remained true to Bomberg's values of authenticity in brush marks, immediacy and truth of feeling, whilst at the same time forming a unique vocabulary of his own. Oxlade's work combines a love of the absurd with wit, sensuality, spontaneous brushwork and a rejection of 'artiness', something he felt damaged art. His paintings evolved from a determination to create 'real' art, freed and uncorrupted by formal painting traditions.