 | John Virtue's "Landscape No. 707" is one of the works featured in the new exhibition focusing on the artist's drawings and paintings of London. |
A contemporary artist's urban visions will be featured in "London: John Virtue," a new exhibition opening at the Yale Center for British Art.
The Yale museum will be the only North American venue for this exhibition of recent works by Virtue, who is best known for his paintings of rural England. The show will be on view Feb. 2-April 23.
"London: John Virtue" draws together approximately 120 works, including 11 large-scale paintings and numerous preparatory drawings, created while Virtue was associate artist of the National Gallery in London from 2003 to 2005.
On weekday mornings, in all seasons and weather, Virtue observed and drew the city either from the roof of Somerset House or that of the National Gallery, overlooking Trafalgar Square. On other occasions, as artists did centuries ago, he crossed the river to the South Bank to capture the city from the opposite side of the Thames. Over a period of two years, Virtue filled his sketchbooks with drawings, seeking to capture the vitality of London in its abstract patterns.
These preparatory drawings will be shown with the finished paintings to illuminate the artist's creative process. Some drawings have color notes; others bear paint splatters from their use in the studio and show traces of the sweeping, monotone brushstrokes seen in the finished canvases.
According to the artist, "I have no interest in recording a rhetorical history of London; really I'm interested in making exciting abstractions from what I perceive. So in a sense I'm not a Londoner painting London out of any roots or any kind of affection -- I'm an accidental tourist here, but I intend to go on working particularly on sites around the river Thames."
Virtue's works are in many museums, corporate and private collections in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Europe and Japan. He began his artistic studies at age 17 at the Slade School of Fine Art, where he studied under Frank Auerbach. He quit four years later, destroying his body of work and returning to northwest England. Intent on capturing the region's wild, isolated landscape, he took a job as a postman to subsidize his artistic endeavors and began walking set paths through the countryside, sketching his environment and later working the sketches into large landscape paintings. By the time he began to make a name for himself in the mid-1980s, Virtue had developed his distinctive monochromatic palette. In 1995, he was invited to teach at the Exeter campus of Plymouth University. He left four years later to dedicate himself fully to his painting.
The National Gallery invited Virtue to become its sixth associate artist in 2003 because of his strong connection to the landscape tradition, with its emphasis on sketching in the open air. The works he created there were the subject of two separate but concurrent exhibitions in London: "John Virtue: London Paintings" (National Gallery of Art) and "John Virtue: London Drawings" (Courtauld Institute of Art).
"London: John Virtue" has been organized by the Yale Center for British Art in association with the National Gallery, London, and the Courtauld Institute of Art, London. The organizing curator at the center is Angus Trumble, curator of paintings and sculpture. The show is supported by the British Council.
A concurrent exhibit, titled "New Small Paintings of the Thames, 2005," will be on view at Jonathan Edwards College. (See related story.)
The book "London: John Virtue" -- featuring all of the artist's London paintings from the National Gallery exhibit and a selection of his drawings from the Courtland show, as well as numerous essays -- will be available for purchase in the British Art Center's museum shop.
The Yale Center for British Art, located at 1080 Chapel St., is open to the public free of charge 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday and noon-5 p.m. Sunday. The building is wheelchair accessible. For further information, call (203) 432-2800 or visit the website at www.yale.edu/ycba.
T H I S
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