Tate St Ives
19 May – 30 September 2018
Turner Contemporary, Margate
19 October 2018 – 6 January 2019
The acclaimed British artist Patrick Heron (1920–99) will be celebrated in this retrospective exhibition, the first major show of his work for twenty years. One of the most significant and innovative figures in twentieth century British art, Heron played a major role in the development of post-war abstract art.
This exhibition – spanning over fifty years of work from 1943 to 1996 – provides a rare opportunity to experience the scope and ambitious scale of Heron’s painting as well as his consistent attachment to the subject of colour. In 1962 he explicitly claimed that ‘colour is both the subject and the means; the form and the content; the image and the meaning, in my painting today.’
Heron’s abstraction is a direct response to the light, colour and shape that he encountered every day. An art of pure visual sensation, his paintings are the result of his experience of looking acutely at the world and though they do not represent the garden and landscape surrounding his home and studio in Cornwall, those forms resonate in his painting in fundamental ways.
The exhibition in the new top-lit gallery at Tate St Ives is the first opportunity to bring together a group of these large-scale expansive works to Cornwall, reveal the full evolution of his vibrant abstract language, unlock new insights into his art and encourage the viewer – immersed in the rich aesthetic sensibility of his colour-saturated paintings – to enjoy the simple and joyous act of looking.
Rather than a conventional retrospective, with a chronological display, this show is a succession of spaces and juxtapositions across the full breadth of his career to encourage a new understanding of his achievement as an artist and the creative processes he followed.
Patrick Heron is curated by Andrew Wilson, Curator Modern and Contemporary British Art, Tate Britain and Sara Matson, Curator, Tate St Ives with Sarah Martin, Curator, Turner Contemporary.
Patrick Heron is organised in association with Turner Contemporary, where it will tour from 19 October 2018 to 6 January 2019. A joint symposium organised by Turner Contemporary with Tate St Ives will be held Friday 23 November 2018. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue from Tate Publishing.
