We're delighted to present an exhibition in our main gallery of paintings and prints by Rigby Graham (1931-2015). This will be the first major exhibition of his work since his death 5 years ago.
Rigby Graham called his art 'an acquired taste which appeals to the lopsided' and the title of Malcolm Yorke's major biography, Against the Grain, aptly describes the man and his work.
'...Irascible painter whose idiosyncratic landscapes are among the 20th century's best.' - The Sunday Times, 2015
'There are few people alive who can make their drawn illustrations 'lie down' so comfortably on a page with type - especially when he has designed the whole book himself. He is a real graphics man, and that would nail him down and mark him out, were he not such a good landscape painter and draughtsman, too. - John Piper, 1986
'Compared with some of his better-known contemporaries he has ten times as much to say... It is Graham and not Rowland Hilder to whom historians will turn in future years to find out the look of the late twentieth-century landscape.' - Fances Spalding, 2003
'He was, above all, a master of line: an assured encompassing line, that quested around and drew what was pertinent, ignoring the irrelevant.' - Andrew Lambirth, 2016
We will be open by appointment and will also be filming Mike Goldmark presenting an exhibition walk-through for anyone who can't visit us. We will be hosting live online reminiscences and the exhibition work has been photographed and will be presented for sale on our website. We have been staging these guided online tours of our exhibitions and interviews since the beginning of the pandemic and they have proved immensely popular and insightful. Sign up to our newsletter below to stay informed.
A 48 page monograph entitled Rigby Graham Painter, Printmaker and Man of Letters with photographs of work, letters and portraits and essay by Mike Goldmark will be available here at the gallery or from the website.