Graham Sutherland
An Unfinished World
Modern Art Oxford
30 Pembroke Street, Oxford OX1 1BP
The exhibition concentrates on Sutherland’s early Pembrokeshire landscapes from the 1930s and 1940s, works created during his time as official WWII war artist, and after his return to Pembrokeshire in the 1970s. Far from traditional studies of landscape and environment, these works not only depict but also exude a world that is as dark as it is magical, as elusive as it is recognisable. Strangely bereft of human life, the works navigate the real and imagined; where country lanes loop into each other, horizon lines fold into foregrounds, and nothing is as it seems.
George Shaw presents these works through the lens of a contemporary painter, describing them as ‘a lament to the passing and changing landscape, a monument to the earth itself’. The exhibition shows us Sutherland as an artist as much rooted in the past as in the world before him—a world forever unfinished.
An Unfinished World brings together over eighty rarely seen works on paper from public and private collections across the UK, including National Museum Wales, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Imperial War Museum, Tate, several private collections and many regional museums.
The exhibition is accompanied by a publication that includes texts by artist Brian Catling, doctoral researcher Rachel Flynn, writer Alexandra Harris, artist George Shaw and Michael Stanley, Director of Modern Art Oxford.
An Unfinished World is supported by Bonhams.
TALKS
GEORGE SHAW IN CONVERSATION WITH DAVID FRASER JENKINS
Tuesday 13 December, 6pm
George Shaw is joined by David Fraser Jenkins, art historian and curator. As a young curator at National Museum Wales in the 1970s, Jenkins worked with Graham Sutherland to establish the Picton Gallery.
SIMON MARTIN ‘GRAHAM SUTHERLAND AND THE POETRY OF LANDSCAPE’
Friday 20 January, 6pm
Simon Martin, Head of Curatorial Services at Pallant House Gallery, explores the close relationship between Graham Sutherland’s interest in the imagery of artists such as William Blake and Samuel Palmer, and his own depictions of the landscape that fused modernist abstraction and a poetic sense of place.
GEORGE SHAW, ALEXANDRA HARRIS AND MICHAEL BRACEWELL
Thursday 23 February, 6pm
George Shaw discusses Sutherland’s work with the writer Alexandra Harris, and the critic and cultural commentator Michael Bracewell.
TOURS
SIMON GRANT
Thursday 26 January, 6pm
Simon Grant, writer, art historian and Editor of TATE ETC Magazine.
CLARE WOODS
Thursday 9 February, 6pm
Clare Woods is an artist producing large-scale paintings, combining landscape and figurative detail with distortion and abstraction.
Free, just turn up
COLIN HARRISON
Saturday 18 February, 3pm
Colin Harrison is Curator of British Art at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.
Free, just turn up
RACHEL FLYNN
Saturday 3 March, 3pm
Rachel Flynn is an AHRC-funded doctoral researcher at the University of Bristol and National Museum Wales.
Free, just turn up
Modern Art Oxford, 30 Pembroke Street, Oxford OX1 1BP. Tel. +44 (0)1865 722733. Email: info@modernartoxford.org.uk. www.modernartoxford.org.uk
Open Tuesday & Wednesday 10am–5pm, Thursday to Saturday 10am–10pm, galleries until 7pm, Sunday 12pm to 5pm, closed Mondays.
Admission Free.
*Image above:
Trustees, Cecil Higgins Art Gallery & Bedford Museum © Estate of Graham Sutherland
