Adrian Heath: Mysterious and Sensual

Adrian Heath: Mysterious and Sensual

22 Mason's Yard London, SW1Y 6BU, United Kingdom Friday, September 25, 2020–Monday, November 30, 2020


This year we celebrate the 100th anniversary of the birth of Adrian Heath (23 June 1920, Maymo, Burma - 15 September 1992, Castelnau de Montmiral, France) - one of Britain's most acclaimed abstract painters of the post-war era.  

It is unexpectedly difficult to associate Heath’s schematic preparatory drawings with particular paintings because the initial plan becomes heavily overlaid in the painting process. He meticulously surveyed the area of his canvas, prospecting for new compositional possibilities. 

The dry accounts he gives of the drawings made around the time of his first one-mas show at the Redfern Gallery in 1953 do not do much to prepare one for the paintings themselves; he describes them as ‘measured diagrams illustrating the progressive displacement of the areas that had themselves been derived from the format of the canvas’.   

In the first half of the 1960’s a constant and very traditional reliance on drawing as a preliminary to painting’ became the fundamental element in his approach to his work, and remained so, in spite of various changes of style, for the rest of his life.   

As the paintings themselves became more spontaneous and casual in appearance Heath was working from numerous landscape and figure drawings, sketch after sketch done at speed; a few of these would be selected as the subject of new drawings, usually in another medium and often after a considerable passage of time during which their original significance had vanished. And if at a later stage the painting became ‘confused or ran out of steam’, he would make more drawings from the painting itself to help ‘clarify my intentions or to formulate new ideas’.   

The works on paper in various combinations of oil, gouache, ink, watercolour, collage , crayon and sometimes household paint, are full of unambiguous romantic feeling that is a little reminiscent of Graham Sutherland’s drawings of the 1940s.   

This new exciting online exhibition provides the opportunity to view previously unseen small works on paper and card executed between 1963 and 1991.  

All works are for sale.