Exhibitions
SIX PAINTERS SELECTED BY ANDREW LAMBIRTH
Browse & Darby, Cork Street, London, 10th September to 8th October
I should say at the outset that Andrew Lambirth is a confrère – not a colleague, since we have never worked together – whom I have long admired as art critic, biographer and curator.
Our tastes do not always coincide, but they are similar. Life would be sad if one could not write about people and things that one approves of.
The six artists he has chosen for this online and actual exhibition, five British and one Irish, are all, in a loose sense, figurative painters, but their styles, subjects and approaches are different enough to give those hanging the physical show several interesting challenges.
Each painter is showing six to eight works, all of them new. This has extended the range of subjects, since the postmodern Stephen Chambers (who is unafraid to offer beauty) has spent his lockdown painting flowers in Berlin, while Ann Dowker calls up recent visits to Egypt, where she stayed for a time at Luxor.
Dowker deserves at least three cheers for her remarks that ‘Good painting is always optimistic', and ‘I feel very strongly connected to my “artistic heritage” for, if you do not acknowledge and value the past, how can you possibly connect with the present, let alone the future?'
Vanessa Gardiner, who lives in Dorset, paints the shores of the West Country, conjuring a solid reality from the geometric blocks of cliff, sea and sky – clean, crisp and evocative, in Lambirth's words.
Michael Kane, born in Dublin in 1935 and the oldest of the group, is highly regarded in Ireland, less familiar in the London art world – although this may change with the publication of a twovolume autobiography, which is unlikely to be dull. His boldly coloured expressionist paintings certainly aren't, and take the show closest to abstraction.
Władysław – ‘Waj' – Mirecki was born in Chelmsford, and Essex remains his home. He runs the Chappel Galleries, Colchester, and has made a leitmotif of the great Chappel Viaduct. Here he travels further, to Salisbury, where he pays worthy homage to Constable, and also to Barnard Castle, where he looked closely at a 14th-century bridge. Mirecki is self-taught, and evidently a good teacher.
Linda Ryle ‘survived the prevailing fashions for Abstract Expressionism and Constructivism at Goldsmiths' and has found a very individual voice. It is gentle, and sometimes melancholy. Here her dog-head-handled stick leaning in a corner suggests that it is waiting for Hammershøi to take it for a walk.